What are Visitors Looking for on Your Small Local Business Website?
Optimizing your local business website can sometimes seem like an overwhelming task.
Where do I start?
Here are a few simple points you should review to ensure your site conforms to best practice for SEO and user experience;
1. Mobile friendly / Responsive Website
It’s no secret, we live in a time where mobile phones are dominating internet usage. And with most of mobile searches having local intent, you’re going to want to make sure your website is mobile friendly. Otherwise you may lose a potential customer, to your competition who has a mobile friendly site.
Beside the user experience aspect, search engines are always growing and innovating, constantly coming up with new and strategic ways to better serve their customers, including mobile searchers.
As of April 2015, Google officially made mobile friendliness a ranking component, especially when it comes to local websites and business.
You can check to see if your website is mobile friendly using Google’s free mobile-friendly test.
2. Contact Us Page
As a business, it only makes sense to provide an accessible method of contacting you. Besides the typical phone number and email, you will want to have your address or location, a Google map illustrating your location, and business hours unless otherwise listed somewhere else visible on the site.
3. Easy-to-find Contact Info on Each page
One of the first things someone searching looks for is proximity to them (phone number and location). This not only assures the user they’ve landed on the right page but wastes no time being able to contact you if need me. Typically, your website should have the contact info near the top of the website, and if not possible, at least on the bottom. The essential details to have are; phone number, email address and location address ( if more than one location, you can add location-specific pages)
4. A clear description of who you are/ “About us” page
Generally you want to have an About Us page, perhaps talking about what you do generally, how you started and your mission statement.
The point is to convey both who you are, and what your business is about. It also doesn’t hurt to play to an emotional connection, and post images of the business and its staff.
5. A List of Your Services or Products
It kind of goes without saying, yet time and time again I come across the odd site, finding myself confused as to what the business actually does. Don’t make this critical mistake.
You’re going to want to make sure you list your products or services as clearly and concisely as possible, ensuring maximum ease of use. For SEO purposes you should have each service on its own page, with a brief description of what the service is.
6.Customer testimonials/ Third-party validation
As you probably already know, online business reviews play a major role in the conversion to sales of both services and goods.
Therefore, having reviews, especially a positive onsite testimonial will act as an authoritative push to buy from you. Like online reviews nothing instills more trust in a consumer than hearing the testimonials of previous happy customers who trusted you and were rewarded.
In addition, it definitely helps if you can put up authoritative ‘trust mark’ badges such as from the BBB, or certifications of your associations or industry.
7.Links to your social media pages
If you have social media pages, it only makes sense to link to those pages in case anyone wants to connect and receive direct updates.
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Including these simple features can not only help boost your SEO & rankings, but your potential clients will have a much easier time finding the information that they need.
