A crucial connection between small businesses and their increasingly mobile clientele is made through their websites. However, 36% of small businesses don’t even have a website! Keeping a site optimized is essential for attracting new clients, establishing trust, and fostering client relationships.

Nearly one-third of small business owners manage their own websites. But regrettably, they overlook crucial website features that users demand, such as social media integration, adaptable and user-friendly design, and fresh, relevant content.

Let’s look at the major issues with small business websites, as well as the costly errors that owners of these companies commit when attempting to manage their websites.

Not mobile responsive

Any business must have a mobile-first, responsive website nowadays. Not only do your mobile visitors expect this, but Google has mandated it ever since the Google Mobile-Friendly Update of April 2015. Over 60% of website visitors originated from a mobile device at the end of 2016. This rises to above 90% for particular industries.

However, just 60% of small business owners have a mobile-friendly website or are aware of whether their website is mobile-capable and responsive.

Many small businesses are losing out on important customers because they lack the capability to engage with mobile visitors. The only solution to this is mobile-first web design during website development for small businesses, which could better be achieved by availing of website development services.

Poor design

Many small business owners have serious concerns about the cost of building their websites. In order to save time, many people choose hosted services like Wix, Squarespace, or free templates.

In general, it is not suggested to do your own website design. Most often, it results in subpar designs that take away from the point business owners are trying to make.

Bad website experiences will also cause visitors to leave and stop interacting with a business. Even worse, they’ll probably tell their friends about the unpleasant experience and discourage them from visiting as well. Therefore, while you will initially save a little sum of money from website design services, you will ultimately lose much more in the form of lost sales and missed opportunities for lead creation.

No metrics

Small businesses cannot monitor their development, their paid or organic reach, or their customers’ preferences and demands without performance metrics. Unfortunately, a staggering 75% of small business owners do not use analytics tools like Google Analytics to evaluate the effectiveness of their websites.

And 60% don’t believe they have the resources needed to interpret the statistics for their website or take appropriate action to address problems. Furthermore, unresolved issues only get worse over time.

There are other website analytics tools available that are free to use and install in addition to Google and Bing Analytics. Pingdom and GTMetrix are two tools that can give you precise information on the people that are visiting your website. This information includes the amount of time it took for your website to load, the computer and browser that the user used to access it, and even how satisfied they were overall.

On small business websites, this kind of data can identify bottlenecks and offer suggestions on how to fix them.

Poor SEO

Small business entrepreneurs need every edge they can get as the market becomes more competitive. It’s essential to be discoverable online so that clients may find your company or business.

However, only 26% of small firms can be located online! The primary cause is that their small company websites either receive a Google Page Rank of 0 or none at all. Many small business owners are reluctant to implement a search engine optimization strategy because they are unfamiliar with the fundamentals of SEO. However, the lack of an SEO strategy prevents them from improving their search presence.

Especially if you are running a real estate business, you might want to consider hiring a website consultant for this.

Running a website for real estate but don’t know how to optimize it? Let us help you.

Top Results Consulting provides growth-driven web design and web development for small businesses in the United States. We can design your fully-optimized WordPress website to fit your marketing strategy. This, combined with SEO-optimized content, can guarantee the traffic and leads your website needs to gain higher conversions.

Get in touch with us today.