They say that, today, not having a website equals invisibility. Truth or not, we cannot deny the benefits online presence has to offer to your business. However, there are several things to consider before you start working on the website itself. Every page and every element of the website has to be thoroughly planned and executed, or else you risk inflicting more damage than good to your brand.
Hosting
This is one of the most significant things to consider before building/launching a website. The difference between the good and the bad hosting can cost you your customers and profits. In most cases, a website for a small local business will suffice with basic hosting offers that range from a few bucks/month upwards. Just keep in mind the size of your website (the number of photos, for e.g.), and the expected traffic, so you can estimate the bandwidth and storage requirements. The most important thing to remember here is to thoroughly research the available options, since not all hosts provide constant and stable service.
The website
First things first – what you’ll need is to opt for a ready-made solution rather than try and code everything by yourself. It goes without saying that grasping the knowledge required to build a website (a good website) takes more time than you probably have to develop and launch your website. What would be good, though, is to cover HTML and CSS basics at least, since these are widespread and used by most website builders. Both HTML and CSS will be needed to maintain and improve your site, should the need arise.
Once launched, make sure that you create a Google Search Console account to submit your website. Also, adding a business profile on Google+ makes your business info more accessible via mobile devices.
Content
Probably one of the most worn out phrases in the SEO world is “Content is King”, nevertheless, it is not far from truth. A well-thought and implemented content strategy can make all the difference, especially on a local level. With that in mind, curating content highly optimized to aim local topics can impact your positioning in local search results.
Everything that you can read, see or hear on a website is considered content, not only blog posts. That is why optimizing things, like item descriptions, meta descriptions, titles and headings comes with high priority. Don’t forget to add <alt> tags to images and hyperlinks and place internal links to all of the pages, especially from blog posts by adding a call to action at the end.
Speed
This one is fairly simple: go to Google Test My Site and examine how well your website fares in terms of loading speed and mobile readiness. An often overlooked cause of high bounce rates, page speed plays a crucial part in retaining visitors and improving ROI. A well optimized website should be able to load within a couple of seconds. However, if you failed to do some basic tweaking while building the website, fear not – Google has the solution. With results from Test My Site, you will be able to mend anything that might cause slow loading times.
Unoptimized – large images, no caching, slow host, too much scripts, heavy above the fold content, these are the things that have high impact on page speed, so it wouldn’t hurt to dedicate your time to solving them as soon as you launch your website.
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