What is the purpose of a small business website?

Be an informational resource and show off your work and prove that you are a “real” business?
Be your administrative assistant and answer questions and book appointments?
Be your 24/7 salesperson and convince someone to call you or buy online?
Be your advertising medium and have people find you online?

Each of these is a valid reason to create a website, but each one might call for a different focus in how you structure your website, and even how many websites you have.

1. Informational Resource

Many businesses start off with their first website to be informational and maybe show examples of their work. Often, this is a good place to start. It is not copy intensive, or the copy may already be written in other marketing materials. It is easy to determine what photos are needed and what pages should be created. Depending on what services or products you offer, this may be 3 to 10 pages including the standard About Us, Contact Us, Services, etc. If all you are looking for in your website design is to be a “real” business, this may be all you need to do.

2. Functional customer convenience

If you have a business that gets phone calls all day long for routine things, adding some functionality to your website would be the next logical step. This can be very simple if you already have a backend system for booking appointments, or scheduling services. Many business software packages have interfaces already developed and they can be inserted into your informational type website with very little effort. If you don’t have a backend system that allows this, there are ways to still build this functionality into your site.

Additionally, if you get calls with the same questions, over and over, we recommend that you jot down the questions and answers that you normally give. These will become your FAQ’s or Frequently Asked Questions. Having these on your site, allows your prospects or customers to answer their own questions without having to call you. FAQ’s help the search engines see that you are an expert since the questions that people ask you, are probably being asked hundreds if not thousands of times all over the country and the search engine wants to show answers to those questions.

You can even take this one step further and create videos about the most common FAQ’s. This will show off your businesses personality and just think how powerful it would be if someone comes to your website with a question and they find a video you created that perfectly answers their questions. Or better yet, they search for their answer and find the video first which then leads them to you!

Check back for part 2 where we will get into the “heavy lifting” that a website can do for a small business.