7 Brilliant Ways To Teach Your Audience About Business
There was a time when people heavily relied on the Yellow Pages book to look up businesses that offered the products or services they needed in their local areas. However, online search engines, such Google, Yahoo, and Bing, have made life easier for consumers and they no longer have to use the traditional route for finding businesses.
Unfortunately, some small businesses are still wasting their time and marketing dollars in places other than the internet. In fact, a good number of small businesses do not have a website that is easily found in the search results; even worse, millions still do not have a website at all.
But taking shortcuts on your online visibility can be detrimental to your company in the end. A website that allows you to engage more with your customers and gives them the immediate impression that you are a strong, professional, and dedicated business. Simply put, you are losing out on great opportunities for your business if you don’t have a website for it.
Many small business owners claim that they do not have the time or finances to develop a good website. It is true that small business owners are quite possibly the busiest people around; however, not finding enough time to build a website is something that simply cannot be justified in this day and age.
In order to find the products or services they need, consumers turn towards the internet to search for them. Furthermore, they decide whether or not to do business with a company based on its website.
In order to help your business grow, you can accomplish many different marketing strategies with the help of a website. If there isn’t a virtual home-base for your company where consumers can learn more about your business, any other marketing initiatives can turn out to be a waste of time, effort, and money.
Today, small businesses that do not have a website would find it very difficult to sell their products or services. The key to attracting and engaging with potential and existing customers is a clean, eye-catching website.
Your website is your online business card that provides potential customers with information about your business, the services/products you offer, and your contact details. Furthermore, when potential customers are deciding whether to buy from you or not, you can increase your credibility and give potential customers more confidence with a great website.
But perhaps even more important than having a website itself is having good, valuable content on that website for maximum conversions.
Whether you design it yourself or hire a professional web developer for it, your website needs to include 7 basic pages. These pages are an essential part of any, be it big or small, website.
In this brief report, I will review the 7 pages your website must have and the what type of content should go on those pages.
How Many Pages Does Your Small Business Website Need?
An open doorway that invites search engines and web traffic to your website is what every page on your website is. Keywords are important because search engines find your website through them. The more pages you have, the more keywords you’ll have and having more keywords means increasing the chances of people finding your site.
Basically, you’ll bring more web searchers to your website by increasing the number of pages and consequently the number of keywords on your website.
In spite of this, the ‘actual’ number of pages your website needs to have depends on a few basic factors. The factors include your organization’s goals, budget, website type, time, and competition.
Users will leave your site for a competitor’s if they can’t easily find what they’re looking for. Therefore, limiting the number of pages on your website to keep it under control is also important.
In my personal opinion, it is best that you include at least these 7 fundamental pages to give visitors what they need, keep them engaged, and help your business to convert traffic into sales:
- Home Page
- About Us
- Product and/or Services page
- FAQs Page
- Testimonials Page
- Contact Us Page
- Portfolio
The aforementioned pages are what every small business website needs to have in order to provide visitors with a good first impression, as well as provide some of the basic information they may be searching for when it comes to your business.
Let’s look at each type of page in more detail:
1. Home Page
A home page is the basic requirement for every small business website. The home page introduces your brand to visitors as it is the first page your visitors see. There are a few things that your home page must accomplish.
These things include letting visitors know who you are, what you do, and how your product or service can benefit them. In other words, this is where you engage your target market, establish trust and give a brief overview of what you have to offer.
Your home page should include a strong headline, a primary call to action, supporting images, clean navigation, and links to your social profiles for the best results
2. About Us Page
The About Us page provides additional specific details about your brand and provides visitors with an insight into your practices, philosophies, policies, and personality. You can build rapport by giving a brief and interesting account of your personal background or company’s history on this page.
3. Products and/or Services Page
Some companies try to cover their product and/or services on the Home page or About Us page. However, this isn’t such a good idea; especially if your product line isn’t simple or straightforward. Therefore, it is advisable for you to have a dedicated page for your products and/or services. In fact, depending on how deep your product or service funnel is, you may also need to create dedicated landing pages for each one.
Educating your visitors about the “features, bells and whistles” of your products and/or services is good. However, your real focus should be on their “benefits.” Focusing on the benefits can help you establish an emotional connection with viewers that shows that you understand their needs vs. trying to sell. In the end, you can expect a higher level of conversions.
4. FAQs Page
Your business website needs a FAQ page if you find yourself repeatedly answering the same questions from potential or existing customers. As a rule of thumb, cover your most common and most significant questions first. But don’t try to write a novel. Short, snappy content that simply provides a brief answer is the best way to go. If viewers have more questions, they can always contact you (so don’t forget that call to action!)
5. Testimonials Page
You can instantly build brand credibility by including a testimonials page on your website. While visitors are there checking you out, why not show them the good things your other customers have said about you. Consumers today trust what others have to say when it comes to businesses, so it’s truly a no-brainer to show reviews and testimonials on your site.
But be careful not to create fake testimonials because people tend to sniff those out fairly easily, which could damage your reputation. Focus on adding real testimonials from your satisfied and happy customers. Don’t have any? Simply ask and you would be surprised at how willing your customers would be to provide you with their true testimonial or review.
6. Contact Us Page
As a small business, the Contact Us page is arguably one of the two most important pages for your company website (the other one being the Home page).
Why? Well, if consumers find it difficult to get in touch with your business (whether they want to call, email, or walk-in), it could be an immediate turn-off. As a result, more of your visitors will move on to your competitors. For instance, if someone is looking for your address and it’s not there, that’s a serious, hot lead – lost.
At the minimum, your Contact Us page should include your local phone number, physical address, email address, and hours of operation. Lastly, embed a Google Map on this page so people can easily get directions to your business.
7. Portfolio / Gallery Page
The Portfolio page is your opportunity to show off to the world what you’ve accomplished so far. You need to use this page to show visitors what you can do and what you’ve already done. In other words, this is the place to show off samples of your work.
For instance, if you are a hair salon, you can use this page to show off different hairstyles that you can do. If you’re a cosmetic surgeon, this is the place to show before and after pictures of your most impressive work.
Depending on your industry and what you offer, it is recommended that you use a diverse range of samples as this will give visitors an opportunity to get well-rounded idea of what you’re capable of.
As an added bonus, any business today can benefit from adding a blog to their website. This is where you can publish consistent, helpful, and relevant content that engages visitors and keep them coming back for more. Not only that, but properly keyword-optimized blog posts can result in a lot of website traffic. So it’s definitely something you should consider if you don’t already have one.
How to Organize Your Website Content
You probably have an idea of how important it is to organize content on the website – since we all have visited a poorly organized website where finding a specific thing becomes a daunting task. The websites of many businesses today have a structure that makes sense to the business but not to the visitors.
In order to ensure that your visitors easily find what they need, it is important for you to know the right way to organize your website content for simple navigation.
Each page of your website should have a specific key phrase or a group of related key phrases.
It is important that each page of your website immediately conveys to both users and search engines what that page is about. Use title tags and headlines with key phrases to convey the purpose of the page. Furthermore, you can use optimized images to enhance your SEO even more.
You will increase the number of visitors who find your content, as well as your website’s ranking by attaching a purpose to each page of your site.
The home page is where your most important content should be featured and linked from.
You would never find the best products of a company shelved at the back of their store. The same should be the case for a company’s website. It is important that you put a spotlight on your best products or services by placing a blurb about them on your home page. This will steer the customers’ attention right towards them and send them off to get more details.
Your primary navigation should include your most important content.
Your navigation is read by the search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo – in a way similar way that human beings read it. Be it humans or robots, they aren’t going to view a page as ‘very’ important if it doesn’t appear in your website’s primary navigation.
Therefore, making sure that your contact page(s) and your most important product/service are accessible from a primary navigation link is key.
Important pages should be linked from within the content of other pages.
There is no denying that navigational links are critical. However, the search engines are now giving equal importance to ‘in-content’ links. This means it is important that you include cross-page links from different sections of your website to your most important content.
An example of this would be a dentist linking the words “root canal” in a customer’s quote on their testimonial page to the website’s services section that focuses on root canals.
Each of your locations should have their own dedicated pages if you operate in multiple locations.
If you want success in local and mobile searches, then this is something you must keep in mind. A single authoritative page that encompasses the address, phone number, directions to the given location, and hours of operation is what Google likes to see for EACH location. The reason for this is simple—it helps Google direct searchers to the most relevant page they are looking for. So if you have operations in Los Angeles, CA and Oakland, CA, you need separate pages for each location so that the right prospects land on the right page.
Contrary to popular belief, creating a small business website is rather easy.
In fact, using some simple web designing tools, you can create it yourself if you have the time to learn how and are short on funds. Otherwise, you can hire a professional web developer if you want a powerful website with all of the necessary marketing elements built-in.
Whether you design it yourself or hire a professional web developer for it, your website needs to include the 7 basic pages of content covered in this report for the best results. These pages are an essential part of any company website looking to attract more leads, convert more visitors into customers, and increase revenue.