Take a few minutes to make sure your website is fully optimized, or to find ways to add to what you've already accomplished in way of your local business web site design.
Design Look & Feel: Is your website catchy, but not too busy? Are the different pages clear and easily accessible? Can a visitor find what they're looking for without much effort? If you cant answer yes to all of these questions, then you need to really look closely at your local business website design, or hire a professional to do it for you. Your site should be easy to navigate for visitors and provide all of the information they're looking for without a problem.
Visitor Friendliness: Its great if you have a site that's optimized to attract visitors, but if those visitors don't hang around once they get there, then the most optimized site in the world wont make much of a difference. To reiterate info about the design look and feel of your site mentioned above, it needs to be something that's catchy but not confusing for your visitors. Less words is often better to clearly get your point and business information across.
SEO Optimized: You want to strategically place keywords throughout your website, use subheadings and bullet points with keywords included, and do what you can to optimize your site behind the scenes. If you've already got the basics down, consider hiring a SEO professional to help you really boost your business to the next level by letting them help you get the most exposure as possible with the search engines via SEO.
Call to Action: Each of your website pages should have a clear call to action. The call to action should be strategically placed in the middle of the page. Web forms are great to use for Call to Actions to help you gather valuable visitor information. Presenting eBooks and white papers for download are also great examples of Calls to Actions that encourage your audience and give you a means to gather visitor information for later use.
Content Clarity and Focus: At risk of sounding repetitive, I thought it was worth it to mention content clarity and focus in a section of its own, though I've mentioned it to some extent previously. Without clear content that involves clarity and focus, it will be hard to hold a visitors attention. When someone lands on your web page, they should quickly be able to decipher what it is you do and the services and products you offer as a local business. They should also be able to read succinct and helpful content that intrigues them enough to keep reading and coming back for more.
You can use these tips if you're just getting your website up and running as a local business, or you can use them as a checklist to make sure you're heading in the right direction to have a sticky (for visitors to hang around and convert), fully optimized website throughout 2012 for more leads and sales than ever before!
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