The Small Business Website Checklist to Boost Revenue

For most small businesses, having a great website is a key differentiator to set them apart from the competition. Maybe your landing pages need some work to reduce the bounce rate. Maybe your website isn’t ranking on the first page of Google. If your website is not set up to rank well, isn’t attracting and keeping customers coming back to the website, and doesn’t tell potential prospects of the product/service you are offering, then you could be losing out on valuable revenue!

One of the most beneficial things that successful companies can do is dig deep into their website’s SEO, but sometimes this can be a tedious process. Since many companies and small businesses may not have the luxury of spending thousands of dollars on their website to generate millions in revenue, we’ve put together somethings all small businesses should be doing to boost their revenue numbers. Let’s go over some ideas to add to your small business website checklist today.

1. Perform a website audit

Not every website is the same. There are many opportunities for growth that may not be readily apparent—such as with content, website organization, ease of use, and SEO ranking. For that reason, the first item on our small business website checklist is to perform a quick audit of your website by checking the following items:

• Links: Are all of the links on your website working?
• User experience: Is your site easily navigable? Does a new visitor know how to get to where they need to go?
• Site Speed: Run a site speed test on your website to make sure your load times are acceptable. If your site takes too long to load, visitors are more likely to leave.
• Image Quality: Are your images pixelated or blurry? Make sure they’re high-quality, without being large enough to bog down your site.
• Conversion Experience: Is the checkout experience and/or lead form experience smooth? Walk through the process of checking out or filling out a form on your own site to see what type of hiccups your visitors may come across that would prevent them from converting.

2. Increase website traffic

There are many ways to increase website traffic. You can drive users to your website by increasing your ranking on the search engine results page through SEO marketing, publishing fresh new content on your site through a blog, keeping your social media accounts active, running Google ads, and running Facebook ads. Having a great website is one thing, making sure people know about it is a whole other thing. 

3. Add new products or content to your website consistently

One of Google’s more than 150+ factors they use to rank websites on the search engine results page, or SERP, is how often you update your website. But this doesn’t mean small changes to the wording here and there, because the freshness factor considers how significant of a change you make as well. Changing an entire web page section could be more beneficial than just changing the wording or fixing typos on things like menu titles, FAQs, product names, etc.

4. Develop/enable a mobile website that is easy to use on the go

A lot of potential customers, especially customers of physical stores’, use the internet on the go to find products they are interested in purchasing, as well as to find information such as business hours, locations, addresses, and pricing. Your website being mobile-friendly can be very beneficial in your chances to get a customer to buy in these situations. Be sure to make the necessary investment into optimizing your website for mobile.

5. Make sure you have an easily navigable website

Next up on our small business website checklist is making sure your site is easily navigable.

If you had never been to a website before, how would you want it set up so that you could find information that you need easily? Most websites do have a slightly different website hierarchy, but the most important pages tend to be the same across the board: Home, About, Services, Products, FAQ, Contact, and Blog.

Of course, the above doesn’t include ALL the pages that may be relevant to your specific business and certainly isn’t a one-size-fits-all list of must-haves for EVERY website, but it is important to have a hierarchy of pages that allows for your users and customers to easily navigate your website.

6. Simplify the checkout process

You don’t want your customers to change their mind after deciding to checkout and buy products/services on your website, and then decide to abandon their cart because the information needed, or the time it takes to checkout is long and tedious. Avoid any problems this might cause, by making sure the checkout process is as seamless as possible. If there is a long checkout process, persistence in suggesting they create an account with fields to fill in with unnecessary information, or even just too much pushing to add more and more to their cart as they are checking out, your customers will be more likely to abandon their cart. If you don’t want your customer to simply abandon their cart, simply simplify the checkout process.

7. Link to your social pages…

…and offer links to allow web users to follow you on social media with dedicated Instagram and Facebook page follow buttons, as well as Facebook Share, Tweet, and Pin It buttons (where applicable).

Some customers just might not be ready to pull the trigger and make a purchase today. That is why it’s important to be able to have a way for them to keep up-to-date with new releases, brand news, and product uses on Facebook and Instagram. 

Whether it be through a follow on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, or even through pinning your products on Pinterest boards, to refer back on when they may be ready to post, linking to your social media pages are a great way to give customers a way to stay connected with your brand and grows your followers count, improving your credibility on social media, especially if you are not a verified entity with a highly sought-after blue check-mark.

It’s not easy to create the perfect website that generates the revenue we all crave as small businesses, but if you take the time to go through our small business website checklist often, you can expect to have happier customers, to gain the trust of your potential customers, and to boost revenue and in turn increase profits that you can use to put back into your business and into your pocket!