Throughout lockdown, Open Door Digital have been publishing daily online marketing tips for small businesses.
These are aimed at those who are looking for new ways to boost their business as the economy starts up again or who simply have time on their hands and want to use it productively.
These are 10 of our favourite tips so far:
1. Do you own your Google Business listing? No? Then claim it. Yes? Then what about your Bing Business listing? Not as important as Google, but still a free and easy way to promote your business online.
2. What format are the photos on your website? Ideally, they should all be jpg and resized/optimised to the smallest possible file size, without affecting photo quality. Aim for 100k file size for each photo.
3. How quickly can visitors to your website find your contact details? A lot of people might be Googling you to get your phone number or address, so make sure they’re really visible, especially on your homepage.
4. If retired relatives are bored in self-isolation then why not ask them to look at your website and tell you what they think. Do they find it easy to use? Interesting? Have they spotted any typos? Could they fill in the contact form?
5. Check your website images have “alt text” to describe them. You only need to do these for images which convey information or help with navigation. This will help the visually impaired use your website through screen reader software.
6. If you have forms on your website, fill them out and submit them to make sure they’re all working OK. Also, see what happens when you get something wrong (eg a non email address in the email field). This is a useful check to do every few months.
7. If you have a search function on your website (which you should only have if it’s a big site), are there common searches for products or services you don’t offer? This could be a useful indicator of what your customers want and help you build your product/service portfolio.
8. Write a blog post which answers a question about your product or services to see if it gets picked up as a ‘featured snippet’ in Google, effectively leapfrogging you to the top of the page. Try for quite a niche question where there will be less competition.
9. Having a “breadcrumb trail” to show the user where they are in your website structure isn’t essential, but it can improve user orientation and also help search engines understand your website.
10. Ask some of your customers from the last 6 months or so to leave you a Google review. If you use social media a lot, then maybe ask half to leave a Google review and half to leave a Facebook review.
If you found these useful, then you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn to receive your daily dose of online marketing advice.