Create a Google Business Profile.
This is hands down the most important thing you can do for your business. It’s more important than a Facebook page, more important than getting a fancy website. It allows you to post images and text, it ensures you can be found on Maps, and it also allows customers to leave reviews. The more positive reviews your business has, the more likely new customers are to give you a shot.
Show reviews on your website.
Social proof is important. People have come to expect it, which means if they don’t see it, they’ll move on. If you don’t have any reviews, once you create your Google Business Profile, reach out to past clients and ask for one. Don’t be shy about this. They will most often be happy to help a small business owner.
If your goal is conversions/sales, keep your site design simple.
Many business owners believe their site has to be super-flashy in order to do well. Not so. Research shows that sites with lots of bells and whistles only end up distracting people from doing what you want them to do. They become overwhelmed and just move on. If your goal is to get people to click a button, then you need to make that as easy as possible for them! In most cases, a simple landing page with an engaging image, a clear statement of your value proposition, and a big fat Buy button is all you need. Movies playing in the background, things growing and shrinking, and lots of other distractions will only hurt your conversions.
Make sure image files are a reasonable size.
If you’re running your own site and you’re not a professional web person, you may not realize that large image file sizes can really slow your site down. They can also ruin the browsing experience for people on small screens (which is more than half your traffic, in many cases) and slow internet connections. Use a free online tool like Squoosh to compress your images, and resize them to the dimensions you need. Don’t upload a massive 4000px image to your site and then tell it to appear in a tiny 125x125 box. The site visitor still has to download that massive image!
Write blog posts about what you do.
Blog posts boost authority in the eyes of search engines. If you use certain keywords in your post, people who are searching for that term will find it eventually… so may sure you’re posting with keywords that appear in your search terms. Lots of business owners are too busy to write blog posts, so MBWD can create these for you—and they will be written by a human, not AI! If you don’t know what terms people are using to search for your business, then check out the next tip…
Collect analytics on your website
Using Google or other analytics will allow you to learn what search terms people are entering for searches that include your site in results. Once you have that information, you can start capitalizing on it by writing blog posts that use those terms, demonstrating your expertise in that area. Think of this as business intelligence!
If you enjoyed learning these things, and you’d like to learn more, come drop us a line! Asking questions is always free.
