Why Small Business Websites Fail - And How To Fix Yours

Quite a bold post title don't you think? How can I know that a website is failing when I don't know what it was created to achieve? But therein lies the problem... most small businesses have a website because they 'know' they need one. Often, little (if any) thought is put into deciding how the website should serve the business. The end result...? A website which seriously under-performs and/or a site which can actually harm the business, either through lost leads or by damaging reputation by not being of the same quality as the rest of the business.
So, it's already obvious the first question you need to ask yourself...

Why does my business have a website, what purpose do I want it to serve?

There are a myriad of legitimate answers to this question. For example, you might want people to find your site and pick up the phone to enquire about your services, you might want them to purchase something directly from the site. You might even simply want to give away free quality information to prove your expertise in a given area - which will eventually lead to new business.

Whatever the purpose of your site, there are a series of questions you'll also want to be able to answer in order to work out how your site can be improved and fulfil it's potential.

how many visitors does your site receive each week?
where did they come from (Google, other sites, etc)?
what did they search for?
did they find it?
what pages did they look at?
did they take the action you wanted (contact, purchase, etc)?


The answers to these questions might surprise you - and without the answers you're effectively blind. The good news is that this information is relatively easy to find out - a free service like Google Analytics will tell you most of it.

Depending on your timescales, budget and expertise you mahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gify want to pay someone to install analytics or interpret the results. And you'll almost certainly want to seek expert advice on how to take your site from where it is now to where you want it to be. That can include anything from reorganising the site from a usability perspective to hardcore search engine optimisation (SEO) so that your site appears higher up search engine results pages (SERPS).

But before we run ahead... be clear on what you want from your small business website and make sure you have visibility of your analytics data (i.e. get answers to the questions listed above).

If you need help with any of that or are ready to move on to the next step, let me know.