Small business and Start-up web site essentials ? Crush Branding ...

If you?re a small business owner, your website is a central part of your marketing and branding. The needs and wants of your prospects and clients should be upfront and center.

Many elements factor into whether a small business website is successful. Careful attention is needed for these items to be effective in the next design for your business, as the benefits are far reaching for both you and your clients.

At the core of these efforts, the focus on creating value for targeted customers.

Some major steps in designing a customer-driven web site include:

• Make a clear differentiation from others in your industry.
• Messages and content that will best resonate with target customers.
• Linking to social media platforms to engaging the consumer with your brand.

Communicate Your Mission

Start by asking yourself these three questions:

Who are you?
Who are your potential customers?
How can you communicate to your potential customers who you are?
What is the desired customer action?

After answering these questions can help us to develop a creative strategy for your website that will ultimately make an impact on your visitors. These questions hold the key to making marketing decisions, branding your business, building loyalty ?and referrals within your customer base, and more.

In creating copy and content for your site, consider the following:

??Your ?brand promise

? Your core marketing message

? Your brand positioning

? Your brand voice

Avoid overly sophisticated language or industry-specific jargon, be direct and concise with?brief sentences and paragraphs.

Your audience needs to understand your product quickly or they will simply move on.

Include a Call to Action

Consistent key messages that are consumer centric with a?clear Call to Action (buy a product, subscribe to your newsletter, request a quote, for example), will increase a users time spent exploring the web site and can?also lead to increased service related page views as well.

Driving traffic to your website will ultimately convert into new business. Make sure your call to action isn?t buried in a sea of text, it should be at the the top ?your web design check list.

The call to action button should be placed in a prominent location, you may need additional text to make it more meaningful, for example, ?Book Now?, is a call to action button and is followed by a page explaining cost and purchasing options.

An effective call to action includes:

Some simple elements ?size, shape, color, and position. Each plays a vital part in directing the user.
There is no need for multiple call to actions on a page. Easy?access to the call to action will help your visitor access information quickly without any unnecessary hoop jumping.

Content

We all love a beautiful website, but your site should ultimately draw focus to the content,

• Research effective keywords and keyword phrases, relevant to your business and industry, that can can bring you high rankings on search engines.
• Determine the goal of your content copywriting. Is it meant to increase website traffic with organic search engine optimization and/or pay per click marketing, or are your efforts primarily aimed at visitor conversion?
• Visitors need to find what they are looking for, fast.
• Your web content should be compelling, credible, purposeful, and factual. Make sure you catch reader?s attention and never forget about the keywords.
• Most people won?t read everything on your page, so decide on the most important content, first, this can be achieved through a visual hierarchy that guides the user through the page and creates a more enjoyable reading experience.
• Use meaningful headings. Be sure you direct visitors to read on.
• Be informative. Relevant information is crucial so put them all in your content.5
• Keep scrolling to a minimum.
• White space is necessary. Giving your content room to breathe allows the user to focus on the most important aspects on any given page.
• Break up lengthy blocks of text into digestible blocks. Heading, sub-headings, bullets, blockquotes, and paragraphs are all necessary components of a well-structured website.

• Always proofread your content carefully.

Flash animations will increase your site?s loading time will so make sure they?really need to be there and serve a specific purpose.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should also be included in your overall website strategy.?By analyzing web site?s functionality, architecture, and content, we develop a site-specific plan-of-action to bullet-point and ?maximize your site?s visibility across the top search engines and portals.

For best results all content, including videos, images, maps, business listings, tweets and even Facebook Page posts need to be incorporated into your site.

?

Adding a Blog Search engines love fresh content and regular updates to your website, you?re giving Google more content to index. More content means your website will show up for more searches. You?re casting a wider net, which tends to catch more prospects which could?increase ?the likelihood that potential customers will social bookmark it and share it with their network.

Consider creating a YouTube channel. Every video you post to your channel can be tagged and indexed, increasing the odds your brand name will appear in natural search results for keywords associated with your business.?A good YouTube username can help?the?SEO of your YouTube Video?to climb the organic search engines as well as the YouTube Search engine. Check out??Killer YouTube Secrets?

Footer links are important to every page, as they use meta description tags, these?links here are no different from any other link, except that they appear at the bottom of the page and will typically point to all the main pages on your website. They help promote your main keywords and more importantly keyword phrases by linking to the pages on your website. Footer Links SEO is more than just repeating the menus at the top of the page, you can direct visitors to your?Call to Action and the footer could also include member registrations, inquiry forms, promotional products, special offers, etc. This may be the last time you get the chance to turn visitors into a customers so make the most of this opportunity.

These elements help drive the overall visual design, layout, typography, color schemes, and language.

We start every project by using the above. Armed with a strong understanding of your business needs, we then put a plan together. We?pay special attention to the treatment of your design elements to create clean, well-structured site focused on your message. There are millions of websites out there; it?s clear that you are competing for your audience?s interest and attention. To this end, it?s important to make those few seconds count when making a first impression.

Crush Branding and Design is here to help you develope?a platform to tell your story, and strengthen your brand awareness, and?connect with your customers and new business prospects.?Give us a call at 813.968.8545!

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About the Author

Located in Tampa, Florida, Crush Branding and Design is led by Marie Lardizabal. Her work ranges from consulting on new business start-ups which includes product naming and concept development to identity, print, and web design. Since Crush's inception in 2007, Marie has grown the company portfolio to include clients ranging from small businesses to international corporations.

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