Currently, around 54 percent small businesses have their website, but only a few of them are able to reap the benefits of online presence.
Just having a website is not enough to approach potential customers looking for your products and services online. Often, small business owners get confused when exploring the most suitable online opportunities and end up making some common mistakes that directly impacts their presence in the digital world. Here are the top five mistakes made by small businesses and you should completely ignore them in 2017 to grow your online business.
Ignoring local SEO
With nearly 97% of the internet users searching for local businesses online, business owners cannot afford to ignore local SEO. It helps you reach out to the customers looking for your business on their phones or desktops. By optimizing your local SEO, you can help your potential customers easily locate your store and visit it for shopping. Besides the customers interested in buying your products and services, you can also reach out to the new audience interested in the products or services offered by your business.
After having a website, you should boost your local SEO by:
- Verifying your Google My Business listing
- Embedding a Google Map in your website
- Optimizing the website content for local keywords
- Using consistent contact details across all the online profiles
Not paying attention to the customer reviews
In the market condition where customers first read the reviews written by other buyers and based on them, they make the buying decision, small businesses cannot ignore them. By not taking advantage of customer reviews, they lose a huge market share and route it to the competitors who show customer reviews on their website.
If you have a small business, you should encourage your customers to write reviews for you and once you get that highlight them on your website. Not just customer’s trust, online reviews written by customers work as fresh content for your website and help you get better rankings in search engines.
Not communicating with the customers
Suppose you go to a store and find no human present to guide you, will you like to shop from such a store? I will never like to buy from a store that doesn’t have any person to communicate with. To make a strong online presence, you should pay attention to your customers, listen to their needs and provide them genuine help. By building an authentic relationship with your existing and potential clients, you can also increase your sales.
Not providing an accessible site to the modern connected user
Gone are the days when just owning a website was enough to reach out to the online customers. With the technological advancement, the customers have also become more demanding and give more attention to a website that is speedy, user-friendly and mobile optimized.
With more and more customers using mobile phones to search a local store, it is essential for the small businesses to make their website mobile optimized. By having a mobile friendly website, you can also increase your chances of conversion and customer satisfaction.
Google recently introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to help users enjoy the unmatched mobile experience. To match the standards set by Google, now it is vital for the businesses to look at the mobile friendly features of the website.
Not connection data between online, offline and mobile
For small businesses with limited resources, measuring the effectiveness of their efforts is a big challenge. Besides the ROI of their online marketing, they also need to explore the best techniques to combine the online, offline and mobile marketing data for better understanding of budget allocation. Failure in connecting the data sets leads to unsuccessful online business and missed opportunities.
At a glance, these mistakes might seem too common, but if not fixed on right time, these can become the reason of a small business’ failure in the online market. If you feel too daunted by these mistakes, you can hire experienced SEO companies to work on your website’s SEO and offer you great results in terms of ranks, traffic and leads.
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