How to Make a Small Business Website in 2023 – Forbes Advisor INDIA

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Read our quick and easy guide to learn how to create a small business website. We’ll introduce you to important design considerations, helpful tools, and how to get your site live.

How to make a website: a step-by-step guide to get you going

Your website is the most effective sales and marketing tool in your arsenal. In five easy(ish) steps, you can create a personal or business website that engages visitors and encourages them to work with you. Here’s how to get started.

1. Choose a domain name

A domain is the unique name of your website.

You can choose any name you want, but it’s best to have one that matches your business or professional name. Not only does this help keep your brand consistent, but it can also have a huge impact on how you appear in search engine results. A good domain name can help you rise in the rankings, which will increase the number of people who click to access your site.

When brainstorming domain names, consider these helpful tips:

• Include keywords relevant to your business to increase your visibility in search engines.
• Make sure the font is simple.
• If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, use the domain name generator as a jumping off point.
• Keep your domain short to make it easy for visitors to remember.
• Avoid acronyms, abbreviations, hyphens, and numbers.
• To use traditional top-level domains or TLDs, such as .com or .net, or those that best match you or your business.
• Make sure no one else is already using it. While you can buy a domain from someone else, this can be expensive. Instead, you might be better off choosing a different name or using a different top-level domain like .net.

2. Register your domain and choose your design and hosting providers

Once you’ve settled on a domain name, you’ll need to register it with a domain registrar. You can do this using websites like Domain.com or Network Solutions. Keep in mind that these providers simply register the domain ownership, which can cost between INR 500 to INR 1,000 per year, depending on your TLD.

You still need to find another URL hosting provider to build your website and use another program to design it. To simplify things, you can choose to register your domain with a provider that offers registration, hosting and design capabilities.

If you don’t have much, or any, coding experience, you might want an all-in-one option like WordPress, Squarespace, or Wix.

If you choose to use separate companies to manage your web hosting and design, look for a hosting service that offers benefits such as tech support, a free domain name, or a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate.

You should consider SSL certificate highly as it is a world-class security technology that enables secure communication and protects your and your visitors’ data and sensitive information. Simply put, this security measure adds an S to the front of a website URL in HTTPS. Search engines and visitors view it favorably.

These features are more common with all-in-one providers, but there’s no guarantee, so be sure the plan you choose offers them before you buy.

Popular web hosts with and without built-in hosting are Bluehost, DreamHost, GoDaddy, and InMotion.

If your web host doesn’t offer any integration features, some third-party design programs to consider are Canva and Adobe Creative Cloud apps. You can create designs on these platforms and embed them on your website pages.

3. Add useful pages and engaging content

You have many options when it comes to how you organize your content about your business and services.

That said, try including these important pages on your website:

• Awesome home page. At the core of your business website is attracting people and telling them exactly what you do and who you serve. Include eye-catching graphics, readable fonts, short and clear descriptions, and calls to action.
• Illumination ‘About Us’ page. Share your business’s origin story. Highlight your achievements, mission and values. You can also introduce any team members to create deeper relationships with customers.
• Booking or shop page. Earn extra income and integrate with a third-party online scheduling platform or an e-commerce platform like Honeybook or WooCommerce.
• Accessible contact page. Include social media accounts, emails, phone numbers, addresses, and a contact form to make it easy for people to find you. If it suits your business, increase your working hours as well.
• Unforgettable content. Sharing compelling content establishes you as an expert in your industry and helps build a loyal community for your business. This can include blogs, videos, podcast episodes, case studies, and more. As a bonus, this content can help boost your ranking in search results and increase site visitors.
• Robust FAQ page. Answering common questions not only builds more trust in your brand, but can also reduce the number of calls and support tickets you receive.
• Testimonials and press coverage. Build credibility by sharing your successes. Create a page that shares positive reviews of your services and include any mentions of your business in popular media outlets.

4. Optimize your website for search engines.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of optimizing your business website so that your pages rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), especially Google. It’s what helps people find you.

When building your website, keep these basic SEO practices in mind to increase your visibility and drive more traffic:

• Use related phrases called keywords in all your posts and pages. Don’t just use keywords for the sake of them. Make sure your choice is deliberate. Overuse can have a negative impact on your ranking.
• Continually publish useful content for your customers or readers.
• Conduct regular content audits or cleanups to see what you can strengthen or refresh.
• Keep your website loading speed as low as possible by optimizing images or enabling browser caching. These adjustments can help your website rank higher in search engine results. You can measure your page speed at GTmetrix. (Learn more about the importance of website loading speed.)
• Make sure your design and content work well on computers, mobile phones and tablets. Don’t underestimate your website’s performance on mobile devices. Up to half of web traffic now comes from smartphones.

Having a beautifully designed business website is great, but search engines want to look beyond that to establish your authority when they index it in their search results.

Be sure to consider your visitors when optimizing your site for search. You want to choose simple navigation systems and build pages that enable fast load times. Follow to accommodate different user abilities Census of India Guidelines to make your site as accessible as possible.

5. Review your site before hitting ‘publish’

Before releasing your website to the real world, you need to test it to make sure it works properly.

Among other things, make sure you:

• Read your content to make sure everything is correct and error-free.
• Check for broken links.
• Remove any filler content from your website theme or template.
• Test your website in browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and others.
• Link your website to Google Analytics To monitor the performance.

Once you’re ready, click Publish. Share it with your friends, market to customers and include it on your LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other social media profiles to help drive traffic to your newly produced website.

Keep your site up to date

You’re not done with your site the minute you enter print. To stay high in search rankings and improve your visitors’ experience, you need to maintain your website constantly. Consider adding the following to your webmaster job list:

• Use a webmaster and analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to track how people use your site. Some website engagement metrics to track include bounce rates, click-through rates, and average session duration.
• Update your website regularly with blog posts, products and promotional offers.
• Conduct monthly reviews to ensure that all aspects of your website, including internal and external links, pages and plugins, are working as intended.
• Update your “About Us” page with new team members or accomplishments.

Over time, you may want to build relationships with other business sites to establish credibility and improve your SEO. When other important websites link to your website, search engines see your site as more credible and worthy of ranking higher in their results.