Once upon a time, a company website was anything but essential. Now, if you don’t have one, you’re almost destined to fail.
Of course, while a lot of those initial barriers have been eradicated thanks to the likes of WordPress and other WYSIWYG editors, the costs for a small business can still be high. Particularly if you entrust a web development agency, you can quickly eat up all of your marketing budget in one go.
In truth, there are a lot of mistakes you can make in this regard and through today’s article, we will take a look at four of the most common as you invest in your first company website.
Mistake #1 – You ignore SEO
Not many things in life are free but when it comes to SEO, this still falls into this category. While it is competitive, and isn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination, SEO can divert free clicks to your website if you use it shrewdly.
Sometimes, you may have to tap into the services of an SEO specialist to help you along your way – but the potential long-term rewards are completely worthwhile.
Mistake #2 – You go OTT with imagery
Sure, everyone likes imagery – and some industries certainly rely on it more than others.
However, a lot of young company websites put together on a budget don’t consider the other repercussions. They will place a hi-rest image on there, and not realize that this has terrible repercussions from a site speed perspective.
Remember, the bigger your image size, the slower your website is going to be. Nowadays, users just don’t accept sites which don’t load in a flash.
Mistake #3 – You don’t update the website frequently
You might have spent a small fortune putting your site together, but it will all be for nothing if you don’t update it.
Users will land on it, see a post from 2017, and immediately think that your business doesn’t have the resources to update their site, or even worse it is no longer operating.
Suffice to say, you don’t want either to happen. You might not have the resources to plough loads of resources into content, but you should at least be able to keep things up-to-date. This might be through company news, your new opening hours, or even fresh information on the products that you sell.
Mistake #4 – You stick to the “build it and they will come” philosophy
This ties into the first point we made, about taking advantage of SEO to bring that initial burst of traffic to your website.
Unfortunately, the motto of build it and they will come couldn’t be further from the truth nowadays. With so many websites out there, you really have to put a marketing plan together. You might not have a huge budget available, but even basic offline tactics can help you substantially in your bid to bring more traffic to your new site.
