Despite the important role they play, many small business websites only serve to confuse consumers with information that’s hard to read, out of date or just plain irrelevant. In a lot of instances, owners make these mistakes unknowingly when trying to balance managing their website while also running day-to-day business operations. While understandable, creating the right impression with potential customers remains too essential to the success of a business to make these types of easily avoidable mistakes. Correcting the following common mistakes can better enable consumers to engage with your business, while also improving the professional appearance of your website.

Hiding Contact Details

It’s hard enough to get customers to visit your website, so make sure it’s simple for them to give you their business. Customers visiting your website need to know how to contact you and where your business is located. While understanding the importance of including such indispensible information seems fairly obvious, it’s surprising how often contact details fail to get adequately displayed.

If your business’ phone number, email and address are only listed on a “Contact” page, they can be difficult to find for customers. Think about displaying these details in your website’s navigation bar at the top and bottom or every page, in addition to the “Contact” page. The easier you make finding these pertinent details for customers, the easier you make it for them to come through your doors.

Broken Links

Your website acts as the public face of your business. Failing to properly maintain your website reflects poorly on your company as a whole. A site that hasn’t been updated recently could even lead some consumers to believe your business is no longer operating.

Users who experience broken links have negative online experiences and are often not likely to return to a site they believe inoperative. Broken links can also hurt a website’s ranking in organic search results. So while links do break over time, or become less relevant to the current state of a business, it’s important to check your business’ website frequently to make sure everything works correctly.

Avoid Using Jargon

To sound authoritative, you may feel tempted to use a lot of industry jargon and complicated terminology when creating the text for your business’ website. While these types of terms may be commonly used in your industry, search engines display results based on whether the content on a website matches what’s being search for. In most instances, consumers won’t possess the same level of familiarity with this type of jargon, causing your website to fall lower in organic search results or possibly not appear at all.

To select the best type of language to use for the text, refer to the website’s analytics tools. Here you can determine what words consumers searched for to reach your website, what searches they conduct while on your site and which pages they stayed on the longest. Gaining a better understanding of potential customers search habits will help you tailor the text on your website to match those search terms and improve your search ranking.

Over Stylizing

Many website owners can overuse fonts and stylized flourishes when designing their sites, resulting in a distracting and visually overwhelming finished product. Use font styles and sizes to help better organize and structure your website’s content, typically using larger text for heading and italics, underline and bold where it can grab attention and provide extra emphasis. Different styles and fonts also help to indicate importance of text for the purposes of search engine optimization.

Designing a great looking and functional website doesn’t need to feel overwhelming. At Local Fresh, we can help you avoid these mistakes by redesigning your business’ website into a brand customers will remember and trust. Click here to contact us for a consultation.