By Rev Ciancio

Source: Small Business Trends

Let’s start this off on the right foot — your website is really important.

Once a customer chooses you over your competition in search, it’s extremely important that your website provide all the information and deep facts about your business in a way that’s easy to navigate. No argument.

However, if you aren’t in control of your digital knowledge — all the facts about your brand (like name, address, phone number, hours of operation, products and services) that live online for customers to search — then your website needs to take a back seat for a moment.

Consumers are on average 3x more likely to make a decision about your business on sites like Yelp, Facebook, Google My Business, Apple Maps, and hundreds of other sites — without ever clicking over to your site. More on that here.

Once you’ve got all those important facts about your brand (i.e. your digital knowledge) under control, then we can talk about what you need to do to ensure your website offers a positive customer service experience — before customers even walk through your door.

The following is broken down into a few sections: Table Stakes,  Mastery, and Super Juice. You can think of these website building basics as good, better, best — or as novice, intermediate, and expert. If you want to crush your competition, set your goals at Super Juice.

TABLE STAKES

These are the basics. Don’t even consider building a website or hiring an agency without these website building basics in place. A lot of them may seem obvious, but it’s important to have a sturdy foundation.

An Easy to Remember URL

Try to buy a URL that’s relevant to your name and business — but don’t over complicate it. Try to stay as short as you can, avoiding dashes. Long names and dashes make it hard for customers to remember your site, and it looks like you compromised. abcnycplumbers.com is much better than yourlocalabcnewyorkplumberfriends.com

Basic Digital Knowledge

There are some universal categories of information that are going to be relevant to all your customers. These are the backbone of your digital knowledge. Where are you located? When are you open? How should customers get there? What do you offer? It’s important that these pieces of information be prominent and easy to find on your website.

• Address / Area of service
• Phone number
• Hours of operation
• Services offered / Menu
• Easy to find contact information
• Social networking links

Read Full Article Here: https://smallbiztrends.com/2017/11/website-building-basics.html