5 Common Mistakes of Small Business Websites

How many small online businesses succeed in making profit for the owner? The truth is maybe quite shocking, according to a recent survey, 90% of small business website only received little to no money. Why did it happen? Apparently, it is because most of the owners of small business websites make the same mistake. Despite SEO and other website optimizing techniques, there are five common mistakes that small business website did. The followings are five common mistakes you’ better avoid if you want to get more traffic, more customers and an increase in revenue.

1. Lack of research

The first mistake small business website owners did is not doing enough or none keyword and keyword phrases research. You need to do this n order to find the number of monthly searches for the term of your business products or services. You would have had virtually little chance to garner any significant traffic for this term. It would take months to years of focused Internet marketing efforts to really start seeing traffic on that term.

You continue with your research until you come up with 3-5 keyword phrases on which to focus. This kind of prior planning will bring you much higher traffic and in turn revenue. In order to do this, you need a capable keyword research tool.

2.    Wrong Focus

Do not use your site to promote your business.  I know this sound like a strange thing to say, you might say to yourself, “Isn’t the whole reason for creating a site?”  Well, it’s not. The mission of your site should be to meet your customers need. People on the Internet are looking for something. They are looking for an answer to some unmet need. It may be information, a service or a product. Your site should focus on addressing that need and demonstrating why they should choose you. Visitors are not interested in when were your business founded or the funny story about how you came up with the idea of going into business. You put a lot of work into researching what people are searching for on the Internet, use that knowledge to create a site that answers your visitor’s needs.

3.    Too Pretty or Too Ugly

You want a site that looks professional and reassures visitors that they are dealing with a real business.  The flip side is a site that has beautiful fonts, graphics, entertaining flash animations, you can chat with other visitors, read downloadable brochures, watch video clips and browse through slideshows. The problem is that with all these option, the visitor will either be too distracted to get the message about how you can meet the need that brought him to your site in the first place or go off on a tangent and surf on through to another site. An effective small business site is clean, simple and looks professional.  Added features are perfectly fine as long as they are there to guide your visitor towards becoming a customer and not distracting him instead.

4.    Improper Use of Sound

Do not use sound on your site, unless it is set up in such a way that the visitor must deliberately request it and it guides them towards becoming a customer. You will find that a very large portion of your visitors during the day are visiting your site from a work computer.  It is embarrassing to pull up a website that begins to blast music or goes straight into a spoken narrative.  This is one sure way to make sure your site is not bookmarked and never visited again.

5.    Lack of Marketing

Most small businesses will budget and pay for a good web designer to create a good clean, professional website and don’t budget any money to market the site once it’s been published.  Even a poorly designed site will return much greater revenue and provide many more new customers than a well crafted website, if it ranks at the top of Google listings for a popular keyword phrase and in turn gets tons of traffic.  Good keyword research is a first and very important step in ensuring the success of your small business web site. A deliberate and focused Internet marketing campaign will make sure your site stays at the top of the search engine rankings and is bringing in the right kind of traffic.

When choosing for a web designer, you should also look for an SEO expert. By combining good site design with a well planned SEO strategy you can take your business to another level and significantly increase your revenue. You can find combination of great web design and SEO experts at SeekDotNet.com, a leading world-wide web hosting company.