Are you a small business owner? Are you wondering how you can better manage your small business website? On top of everything else you have to do as a small business owner, from marketing to accounting to customer relations, managing a small business website can feel like a huge hassle.
Luckily, there are some simple website management tips you can follow and mistakes you can avoid that will make your website management experience a lot easier.
Check out this guide to learn about the top website management mistakes you need to avoid as a small business owner.
1. Not Establishing Goals
You should never just build a website for the sake of building a website. When working on your website management, you should constantly be thinking about what your goals are for your small business website.
Is it to build brand awareness and create trust with your customers? Is it to get people to buy your products and services? Is it to get more people to come into your brick and mortar shop?
Whatever your goals are, make sure you have them clearly defined beforehand. Your goals will influence every decision you make when it comes to website management, from link building to creating landing pages to writing blog posts.
2. Not Maintaining a Blog
Speaking of writing blog posts, maintaining a blog is perhaps one of the most important things you can do for your small business website. Maintaining a blog helps you:
- Drive traffic to your website
- Boost your ranking with Google and other search engines so more people can find you
- Build brand awareness and client trust
- Establish yourself as an industry expert
- Establish relationships with potential and existing customers
- Share valuable information with your readers
- Generate sales leads
- Stay relevant
- Sell your products and services
Before starting a blog, you should research what your competitors are doing in terms of blogging. Once you figure out what’s working and isn’t working, you should set goals for your blog and identify your target demographic.
Then, you can start creating a list of topics that you want to write about. For example, if you own a local medspa, you may choose to write about how to prepare for a Botox appointment, the different types of chemical peels, or how to choose the right medspa clinic.
After you’ve created some content, it’s time to promote your published posts! Every post you create should be shared on your social media platforms. It’s also a good idea to create an email list for sharing your latest content.
3. Making Contact Information Difficult to Find
Since you’re a local business, there’s a good chance people are going to want to get in contact with you directly to ask about pricing, store hours, product information, and more. If someone has a question, they’re not going to trudge all the way down to your business to find the answer.
This is why making your contact information transparent is so important. In addition to having a separate ‘contact us’ page, you should also have your contact information listed at the bottom of every webpage and every landing page. If your contact information is difficult to find, potential customers are likely just going to move onto another business.
4. Not Securing Your Website
Managing your small business website also means managing your website’s security. If your website isn’t secure, people aren’t even going to bother visiting it.
Here are some simple things you can do to secure your small business website:
- Use secure passwords
- Install software updates on a regular basis
- Use a secure website hosting service
- Invest in an SSL certification to keep information protected
- Run regular website security checks
- Secure folder permissions
- Update website scripts and platforms
- Install security plugins
- Keep an eye out for XSS attacks
- Watch out for SQL injection
- Manually accept onsite comments
- Run regular backups
- Keep your website up to date
An average of 30,000 websites are hacked each day, and hackers won’t avoid your site just because you’re a small business. Every single website is vulnerable to hacking, which is why it’s so important that you make use of the above security tips.
5. Outsourcing to Too Many Companies
Let’s make one thing clear: outsourcing website management tasks is a good idea. But, where many companies go wrong is outsourcing to too many different companies.
If you’re outsourcing your blogging to one company, your site design to another company, and your SEO to another company, there’s a good chance that things are going to get lost in translation. This can lead to aspects of your site looking mismatched and incoherent, and it’ll be harder for you to achieve brand consistency.
For this reason, we suggest choosing one website management company that can take care of all of your outsourcing needs.
6. Not Creating a Good Mobile Experience
No matter what type of small business you run, there’s a good chance that people are accessing your site via their mobile phones. In fact, research shows that over half of web traffic comes from mobile users.
This is why it’s so important for you to create a mobile-friendly website. Here are some tips for creating a mobile-friendly website:
- Make sure the website is responsive
- Get rid of text-blocking ads and pop-ups
- Make sure the button sizes are large enough to work on mobile sites
- Avoid using small font sizes and flash
You also need to make sure you’re making website speed a priority.
Website Management Mistakes: Time to Manage Your Website
Now that you know about these website management mistakes, you should have an easier time managing your small business website. By avoiding these mistakes, you’ll be able to bring more people into your store and boost your bottom line.
Be sure to check back in with our blog to learn more about small business website management.
