Micro-enterprise website - what to keep in mind?
How should a micro business website look and function in order to bring real profit to a small business? Check out our tips on this.
It's undeniable that getting started is always difficult, but setting the right standards at the start will pay off in just a few months.
By this I mean, first of all, how a micro-enterprise website should look like.
Below you will find ten tips in the context of what you need to include in such a site in order for it to bring the desired results.
An Effective Micro-Business Website - 10 Tips
1. Take Care of Your Own Professional Domain Name
Shortball: Your website address of namefirmy.co.uk will be the best choice in the vast majority of cases.
Moreover, the shorter the address, the better. Such a name is simply convenient, easy to use, easy to pronounce and easy to remember.
Of course, you can consider other endings than '.co.uk' (as well as using a keyword in the address instead of the company name), but such a choice must be justified by a specific reason.
2. Get a good hosting and SSL certificate
The next step is to bet on the right hosting company. Preferably not one that is well represented in search engines, but one whose quality is confirmed by a number of real reviews.
Don't be fooled by "numbers" based on low (or even zero) prices for various services during the first year. In the next year and beyond, hosting companies often make up for this trick in the first cycle with a higher price.
When choosing the right company, pay attention to the total costs that you will incur for the domain, hosting and SSL certificate over the coming years. Set a specific time frame for yourself, such as five years. On this scale, you'll get a wider range when it comes to any expense.
3. Provide attractive so-called branding
The term "branding" can be used to describe everything related to the name and image of your brand:
- company name
- attractive and timeless logo
- artfully chosen colors
- using a single style in many places (website, car wrap, business cards, folders, employee t-shirts, etc.).
The basic principle is that it should all be consistent. It will be much easier for people to remember your company, because the elements associated with it will be uniform and will be found in a variety of places.
4. Make the homepage useful for visitors
A micro-enterprise website should have a valuable homepage.
What does this mean?
Usually, the home page is the part of the site that most users see at the very beginning.
Its goal is to attract the attention of users, to interest them and let them know that this is where they will find what they are looking for.
Therefore, the main page should be a kind of shorthand for the entire site. It should be a kind of "teaser" of what users will find on the rest of the pages.
5. Give users a specific goal
Unfortunately, in many situations we have to be led almost by the hand.
The appearance of a product subpage in an online store without a clear and bright "Buy Now" button will not be as effective as with it.
All this because the key elements of the website just need to be highlighted. They must be correct
- size
- position
- color
This definitely increases the chances that an important element (like a button) will not go unnoticed by users.
6. Highlight the so-called USP
USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition.
Essentially, the idea is that your micro-business website should make it clear to visitors that your company stands out from the competition.
Exceptionally fast delivery times? Products created or painted by hand? Interesting package contents? Bonuses that no other company provides? There can be many ideas.
Finding something that sets you apart from your competitors can be a great bait for potential customers.
It is also extremely important to skillfully emphasize this fact on your website.
7. Carefully list and explain all services
Small businesses often make a huge mistake on their websites by only casually mentioning what services they can provide.
Let's say someone is offering printed t-shirts and not very conveniently posting additional information about it on their website.
The difficulty is that visitors will be asked a lot of questions about this:
- What colors do you have in stock? And can you arrange a color that is not on your website? When will XXL be available?
- Can I send you my T-shirt for you to print on?.
- What technique is used to create the print?.
- Can I send you any design file to print? However, does it have to meet any requirements?
These are, of course, examples, but please note that many of these questions will arise periodically throughout the life of the company and in the absence of information on the site.
Therefore, it is better to describe once and for all what services you provide. All this is done in order, on the one hand, to save time, primarily for themselves and their clients, and on the other hand, to provide users with information earlier, without forcing them to take an additional action (i.e. contact).
Of course, it's probably not possible to list all the questions in this way, since the questions and problems can be different, but it's certainly worth clarifying at least the main ones.
Our two texts above complement this point perfectly.
8. Provide whitespace
The term "white space" is used to describe white space around various website elements.
A micro-enterprise website should be full of them.
Why?
For a long time, web design trends have been moving towards greater usability, minimalism, clear presentation of information. In contradiction with these principles is the tightness of incompetently designed pages.
White spaces allow the page to "breathe" and ensure that our eyes do not "fly" from place to place, but calmly direct their attention to what is important.
In other words, just keep your company website up to date with current trends in terms of usability.
9. Start a blog
There's not much of a chance that your micro-business will outperform the industry giants in Google search for very generic one- or two-word phrases.
Your competitors have managed to gain such a huge position and reputation during this time that without the monstrous amounts that you spend on SEO, you simply cannot overtake them.
Can you do something about it?
Yes, but you need to choose a different tactic.
Your chance is to start blogging. However, this step won't be enough unless it entails regularly adding extensive blog posts.
I don't know if you know, but the amount of content on a site matters to search engine robots.
Let's say your site has 3,000 words. You don't have a blog on it. Therefore, you decide to support it and determine that every week you will add a new article containing 1000 words.
After a year of hard work, this will give you an astronomical (compared to the previous 3,000 words) figure of 55,000 words.
If each such blog post is about a specific, well-articulated topic in your industry, it will give you traffic from the so-called long tail. This means that your site will be found in the search engine by people who come to the site by typing not short and general keywords (since they are already taken by the giants of the industry), but more specific, long ones.
There is only one additional condition - your micro business website must be perfectly optimized for SEO, like all blog posts you add.
If you stick to this principle (along with the regularity of adding articles and, of course, useful content in them), success will come sooner or later. Yes, you will be waiting months for it, but you will see that any posts in the statistics will grow.
10. Make your company data visible enough
Finally, there is the question of contact details and those who are associated with your company.
If your company has no problems with publishing in a conspicuous place:
- TIN and REGON,
- your business address,
- phone number
- email address,
then it becomes much more reliable in the eyes of users. Yes, the type of data alone cannot completely rule out a potential shoe company, but it cannot be denied that they have a positive effect on the level of trust.
Micro-enterprise website - text summary
As you can see, a micro-enterprise website can be effective. Just because there have been giants in your industry for years doesn't necessarily mean you're doomed to fail.
The main thing is to do all the steps within the framework of a pre-developed plan and just with your head.
I hope these ten tips will be useful to you.
