1. Spammy Linking
2. Low-Quality Content

You may think your website doesn’t fall into either of these, but let’s looks closely at what these two considerations really mean.

Spammy Linking

If you have a small business website, I’m sure that you’ve received one of those unsolicited emails from a random gmail address informing you that your site is not ranked well on google, and promising to deliver 100′s or 1000′s of links to your site, which will improve your ranking. The links that these entities generally get to your site are low-quality, spammy links. There are a few methods that they use to get these:

• Posting irrelevant spam comments on blogs with links to your site in them
• Submitting your site to 100′s of directories (this is good only when done right – there are not 100′s of directories relevant to your site).
• Acquiring links to your site from “link farms” or sites that only exist for the purpose of linking to other sites. These sites often charge to place links or work on a reciprocal basis.

Sites that use these tactics are being penalized heavily by Google – with good reason. Google uses links to determine how much of the web cares about your site enough to link to it. They also analyze the page that is linking to you to determine context and the topic of your site. If the page linking to you is not relevant to your site, it does not make for a high-quality link.

Low-Quality Content

There are many forms of low-quality content, but for the most part, when talking about small business websites, low-quality content comes in the form of what we call DIYContent. This is website content that is patched together, often at the last minute, by various unqualified people within the organization who the website represents. Whether you’re a CEO, accountant, secretary, doctor, or anyone else who is not a copywriter or online marketing specialist – you are not qualified to write the content of your website. In no area of small business website creation do stakeholders underestimate the importance of professional guidance so much, and cause so much damage to their online presence.

If your content doesn’t take at least the following into consideration, it’s not going to do you any good in Google:

• Content should be built off of a professional keyword strategy, so that you know the right words to place in the content, how frequently, on what pages, and in what variations
• Content should naturally link to other pieces of content within your site.
• Content should have a natural, human flow and not be bogged down with “keyword stuffing”

See our article Why Small Business Web Design Gets a Bad Name – Part 3: Content

Wrapping Up…

Now is the time to get serious about your website. Web users have never let half-assed websites slide, and now Google is cracking down harder on them too. This is just a small development in Google’s algorithm among a massive trajectory towards the necessity of considered, professional websites, and the obsolescence of thrown-together, DIY, and on-the-cheap websites.

FYI

All JBD-managed sites experienced a jump up in rankings since the Google algorithm update.

Content Strategy

In most cases, when a company wants a website built, the last thing they tend to think about is how relevant and interesting the content is to the visitors of their site. They fill the site with an overabundance of “fluff” that only serves the purpose of filling up the pages. This kind of content consists of vague and confusing statements which usually don’t give the potential client a direct answer as to HOW they are going to serve them. This is indeed one of the failings in small business web design.

This is where “Content Strategy” comes in. This is the planning stage. You have to think about how relevant the content would be to your target audience and write about what you know they would care about most. Get to the heart of what you’re offering, but if you need to get there through the side-door, do it. Find the middle ground between your readers’ interests and your core offerings and value.

When you have a clear Content Strategy, you have a plan for growth which is more than essential in small business web design. Your blog posts will all follow a relevant theme, your new pages will be on-point, even your email blasts will have a compass to your reader’s clicks.

Content Language

When someone visits your site, they already have a certain goal in mind. When you’ve figured this out in your Content Strategy, you must then provide information that is straightforward, concise and if appropriate, entertaining.

Web content is not like print content. People do not want to read brochure fluff. They expect to be spoken to directly in a conversational tone. They expect action-oriented copy that stays on point and serves them, not your business.

Further, when writing web content you need to quite literally choose your words. Having a strong search engine strategy in place will allow you to pepper every piece of content with keyword phrases that search engines will gobble up and serve to searchers on a silver platter (otherwise known as the first page of Google).

Content Structure

Structure your content so that the path to what your potential client is looking for could be easily found and acted upon. This includes both the internal structure of each content piece as well as the structure of your site’s navigation. Time is of the essence, most people just move on if they can’t find what they what and need right away.

Have a clear path to relevant content based on what the user is currently viewing and how they got to you. Use bullet points, callouts, headlines, and get to the point quickly. Don’t try to build up suspense in the first paragraph and hit them with a bang in the fourth, which happens quite a bit in small business web design. Hit them with relevant content in the first sentence.

Content Should Be:

• to-the-point
• action-oriented
• easy to read (bullets, highlights, callouts, sidebars)
• clearly organized
• conversational
• SEO friendly

By having a well-written website with a well-planned content strategy, you could potentially increase the amount of business you are taking in. This will be due to your site being much more organized, interesting, visible and geared toward the customer’s needs.

L’intimate by Misschivus is a “dual-functioning product that elevates the level of class and discretion for women looking to maintain pleasure in their personal lives.” This product is a high-class pleasure product that is concealed within a functioning lint roller. Misschivus needed a website that exemplified this level of sophistication, quite above the majority of please products on the market.

JBD created a WordPress ecommerce design that is elegant and highly functional, just like the L’intimate product. With an easy-to-use WordPress ecommerce backend, Misschivus can add and update products and content without technical assistance. The simple page structure and purchase process on the front-end ensure a pleasurable user experience.

There are a couple of different names by which Autoresponders go by, such as drip campaigns and triggered emails, but basically they are an automated email or sequence of emails that are sent when a subscriber meets a condition you set.

For example you can:
• Set up custom rules based on length of time
• Trigger based on custom date field
• Choose only certain subscribers

Selecting your trigger

You never want to email a subscriber when it’s not something they’d be interested in or what they asked for. What can be critical is the “set and forget” mentality that comes with autoresponders. So we’ve made it effortless for you to select exactly what should cause an autoresponder to be triggered. The following are great marketing promotions that you could implement through the use of this program:  

• New Subscriber Welcome 
• Birthday Giveaways
• Anniversary Discounts
• Sales Follow-up

For each type of autoresponder you create, you can set up an unlimited sequence of emails. Combining autoresponders means the possibilities are endless! You basically work with us to strategize the criteria around when an autoresponder should be activated, we develop the emails and take care of the rest.

Get started today! Call 732.497.2292 or email john@johnnybees.com.

• individual: reward individuals with free gifts or discounts with purchase
• friend: reward groups of friends the same way
• loyalty: reward customers for visiting a certain number of times
• charity: donate to a charity when customers visit

With more and more tools being added to the Facebook marketing platform, it’s ever-important to create a clearly defined online marketing strategy for your business so that you don’t get lost in the shuffle of gadgets. To find out how your business can navigate and profit in this world of online social marketing, contact Johnny Bees Design.

Firstly, what is branding? Branding is an umbrella term for the overall perception of your business. For our purposes, true branding is the sum of all of the intentional efforts that you make to portray a certain attitude, emotion, philosophy, or value about your business. This includes your logo, your brochures, the typefaces and colors that you use, how you answer the telephone, and of course, your website.

Basically, your brand, and your website, is responsible to give the right vibes. How do you want your company to appear? Corporate? Friendly? Authoritative? Neighborhood beauty shop, or celebrity stylist? We’ll come to you, or you come to us? You must have a clear and detailed answer to this question – an answer that is tied to your business goals. Then all of your website’s visuals, interactions, copywriting, structure and functionality must follow suit.

You might think that the most common problem with small business web design that fails to brand effectively is that they choose the wrong voice – that the website presents the wrong answer to the “Who are you?” question – a friendly, neighborhood family accountant coming off as an impersonal tax cruncher, for example. While that is often the case, just as often the website looks almost totally unbranded. The small business website design is too often an afterthought executed in between the operational hubub of actually running the business. It gets tossed up onto the web without any inkling of the true personality of the organization, but instead looks templated, unprofessional, nondescript, and worst of all, forgettable.

Let’s say you’re that neighborhood, family-values accountant – would you rather your receptionist answer the phone flatly, “XYZ Taxes.” Or in a friendly tone, “Good Morning, XYZ Family Finance Consultants, how can we help ensure your family’s financial comfort?” Which do you think your callers will remember?

The Branding segment’s answer to the question, “Why does small business web design get a bad name?” is this:

Upon hearing your dull receptionist answer the phone forgettably, you should demand that he do better to represent your brand, or hire somebody who will. Just the same, while working with your online marketing company in developing your website, you should ensure that you ask the right questions. Once they’ve been answered completely, ensure that, based on those answers, your website is a clear and compelling representation of your brand’s personality and purpose.

Stay tuned for Part 3: Website Content

findability graphic by aaron walter

Small business websites get a bad wrap. But don’t get me wrong, they deserve it. This article is not going to defend the merits of the typical small business website design. The fact is, most small business websites are nearly useless. The only purpose they serve, if any, is to give that little bit of credibility that prospects feel when they see that you have a site. Let’s take a step-by-step look (maybe in the mirror) at the factors that most small business websites fail at, in order of appearance to the user.

Part 1: Findability

The findability of most small business websites is so poor that the only prospects who ever make it to your site were probably already aware of your company and were searching specifically for you. Maybe they typed in the url off of your business card, or clicked your link in your email signature. This is good, but what about the mass of people who are searching for your products or services, who don’t yet know that you exist? Will your website show up in their Google searches, Facebook combing, LinkedIn asking, or forum posting?

How many times have you heard a business owner gripe over the lack of “results” that they have seen from their website? The problem is that results come from actually doing something on an ongoing basis, in a skilled way. Search engine optimization, social media marketing, content development, traditional advertising, blogging, link-building – these all need to work together from a big picture plan, down to the nitty-gritty, in order to have a truly findable website. Only then can you start to get down to the real nuts-and-bolts of what really works or doesn’t work on the website.

Moral of the story: don’t bash a site until you’re doing all of the right things to get people to the site, you’re getting traffic, and still no conversions. Then you know you’ve really got an on-site issue.

Up Next is Part 2: Branding

Press Restaurant is a trendy little place in NY with a fresh and delicious approach to fast food. Their website, developed by JBD, accentuates their clean and simple philosophy through clean typography, a simple, but memorable color palette, and large photography.

Johnny Bees Design was called in for our Flash programming expertise on this project to transform an idea into a living-breathing, animated fashion website. The result is a seamless interaction set and immersive experience, accentuating Necessary Evil’s core brand image, their story, and the clothing lines.

Johnny Bees Design developed an ecommerce website for LoveHue, a cosmetics and accessories retailer. The store includes a beautifully branded design, simple interface, and features such as coupons, gift certificates, mini-cart, and social sharing.