With my marketing consulting company, High Key Impact, LLC, I am meeting or speaking with new clients on an almost-daily basis. One of the questions which comes up in almost every conversation is about the small business website.
The questions I ask myself (and eventually share the answers with my clients) when looking at the website are the following:
Is the website easily found?
Is it listed towards the top of Google searches? (and I do several searches for various aspects of the business)
Is the website mobile-friendly (as we know mobile is where most of our customers will find us in 2016)?
What does the website look like?
Is the message simple and the text clean?
Can I tell from the home page what the company does?
Small businesses spend on average $5,640 – $11,400 hosting, designing, building and launching a website. Small business owners hope the investment takes care of, at the least, the basic elements entrusted to a website guru.
Sometimes, one of the missing marketing elements during a website launch, is the simplest of all, Google My Business.
Google My Business is a free platform, supported by Google search, which finds a small business website. It allows the business owner to add crucial information including logo, photos, location (via Google maps), phone number and website to the google algorithm for getting found.
Google My Business is simple to set up, takes only a few days to verify (they snail mail a verification code to your business address) and provides instant seek-and-find capabilities.
If your business is not listed on Google My Business, the competition will show up above you during a location and industry basic Google search.
Test it yourself. Search for Italian restaurants in your town. Try to figure out which restaurants are listed via Google My Business.
Then test your small business. Search for your industry in your town. Does your business show up in the same capacity as your competition? If it does not, do you want to sign up for Google My Business?
Feel free to contact me at cheryl@highkeyimpact.com and I’ll walk you through the process!
