• Follow best practices for website structure, such as making it mobile responsive, easy to navigate, and neatly organized with plenty of white space.
• This article is for business owners who want to maximize the effectiveness of their websites to inform and sell to prospective buyers online.

An online presence is important for any business, even brick-and-mortar stores that don't conduct e-commerce. Small business website development is easy with the many website creation tools. Whatever software you choose, keep these design principles in mind.

Make your website mobile responsive with a website development company.

Mobile responsiveness is critical for a small business website development to be effective. American adults spend over five hours on their mobile phones daily, while over one-third shop online via mobile devices. Therefore, your business's mobile website development company must offer a positive user experience.

If potential customers land on your site but need help to read or navigate on a mobile device, they may abandon you in favor of a competitor. Furthermore, a negative mobile user experience affects your website in search engine rankings, making it harder for users to find through a Google search – which brings us to our next point.

Make it easy to find.

It would be best to have a domain name that matches your company name or describes your business somehow. You can even have multiple domains that point to the website development company. This means incorporating technical SEO best practices, keyword research, content marketing, and paid advertising campaigns to drive traffic to your website.

Tip

Consider outsourcing your web development, branding, SEO, and content marketing to professionals who can offer advice and guidance in creating your website and landing pages.

Place your contact information above the fold

If your business depends on people being able to contact you or call your sales team, put that information where they can find it easily.

"Your contact information should be visible, preferably at the top of the homepage, so that visitors don't have to search for a phone number or address if they want to contact the business," said David Brown, CEO of Web.com.

If you use social media to connect with customers, put your social links in the small business website development header or footer, where they are easily found.

Make it easy to navigate.

 It would be best to offer a clear way to get back to the homepage no matter where your readers land. A Google search may often take your reader to a page on your small business website development other than the homepage.

Did You Know?

People scan web pages from top to bottom, from left to right, so put your navigation menu where most people expect to find it: at the top. Use dropdown menus under each top-level category for clean and organized navigation.

Keep your pages uncluttered.

Paul Bolls, associate professor of strategic communication at the Missouri School of Journalism, said that readers need to be able to put information in context. If a site has too much information, it overloads the mind, making it unable to retain the new information. Be sure to use a good balance of text and graphics that presents a clean page.

One way to keep it simple is to cut the social widgets, such as a Twitter feed on your site. Ask yourself if you are adding information your reader cares about, advised Michael LaVista, CEO of Caxy Interactive. If your widget content does not support the page's purpose, remove it.

Make sure it's accurate.

It should go without saying that inaccurate information will turn off consumers, whether it's a wrong number, outdated product information, or simple grammatical errors. Therefore, you should proofread each page before it goes live and periodically check each page, especially after making updates elsewhere.

Tip

Whenever you update core information about your business on your small business website development, also be sure to update your social media pages, Google My Business, Yelp, and other sites on which your business might appear.

Respect the need for speed.

A digital marketing company Akamai study found that 88.5% of web users will leave a website development company if it loads too slowly. Furthermore, the time it takes to load a webpage affects the purchase decisions of nearly 70% of online shoppers.

Ensure your small business website development runs smoothly by keeping the software up to date, optimizing videos and images for quicker downloads, and using a website host that can handle your bandwidth demands.

Have a call to action.

Each page on your website development company's site should entice the reader to do something. In other words, you need to give them a call to action. These landing pages should encourage users to take action, such as calling your company, signing up for a service, buying a product, downloading a whitepaper, or doing something else that benefits your business goals. Please give them a noticeable invitation to take action: a button, a link, or clear verbiage. Keep it above the fold so readers do not have to scroll before finding the call to action.

Keep your design simple.

Limit fonts, colors, and GIFs, which can distract and pull the eyes away from the webpage's focus. Short paragraphs and bullet points make the information more scannable and likely to be read. Ian Lurie, CEO of internet marketing company Portent Inc., suggests keeping paragraphs shorter than six lines.

This is especially essential for mobile responsiveness, a major factor in how Google ranks websites in its algorithm. The better a website's ranking, the higher it appears on the search engine results page (SERP). So if a competitor is mobile-friendly and your website needs to be improved, you could get lower in your customers' search results.

Get personal.

Just as brick-and-mortar businesses invest heavily in their storefronts to represent their brand images, e-commerce retailers need to create high-quality online experiences in keeping with the brand perception, as Tom Lounibos, co-founder of SOASTA, told Business News Daily.

Your About Us page should be a smooth text block about your company. Emily Brackett, president of design and branding firm Visible Logic, recommends including a good photo of yourself or your team to personalize the experience for your customers.

Make sure your website copy is customer-oriented.

Potential customers come to your website to get information that is useful to them. Sometimes they come for educational content on your blog, and other times they focus on researching the products and services you sell. Either way, you should present relevant information that will engage your prospects, give them something of value and build their trust in your expertise.

When planning the content on your website, think about it from the customer's point of view. For example, if you were a prospective customer, what information would be helpful to you? What level of knowledge or expertise would you have already, and what would you need to be explained in more detail? By focusing on your content from the customer's perspective, you can keep them on your site longer and are more likely to create a long-term relationship with them that results in a sale.

Not a writer? No problem; outsource it to a professional copywriter.

Incorporate SEO best practices.

You may have the best website in your industry, but it won't do you good if people can't find it. So while you can spend money on ads to drive prospects to your website, it is more cost-efficient and effective in the long run to bring free organic search traffic.

When people look for information online, they go to search engines, especially Google. Usually, they find what they are looking for on the first page of the search results, so that is where you want your company to appear.

Search engines use three ways to determine where your listing appears: crawling, indexing, and ranking. Crawling means that they find your site through links from other sites. So, make sure that links to your site appear on as many outside websites as possible.

After the crawling bots discover your site, it is indexed, which means it is analyzed for content, including keywords, freshness, relevance, links, and multimedia. Ensure your site has plenty of new, relevant content relating to the keywords you want to rank for.

Finally, ranking is how the search engines determine the best results for a given search. The ranking is based on relevance and authority. Include plenty of relevant content, such as articles on different aspects of a specific topic. Authority is established by the size of your site, its traffic, and how many other well-respected sites link to yours. Small business SEO tools make it easier to optimize your site.