The 4 Essential Building Blocks of a Successful Small Business Web Strategy

By: Jacob, Your Expert

Published: 22 Nov 2021

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There are four essential components that need to work together for your small business to achieve maximum online presence.

Before diving in to each of these, we need to get on the same page as far as what the underlying mechanism is that we are leveraging with each of these. This mechanism is what is called a search engine.

If you have ever used Google, Bing, Yahoo, or Duck-Duck-Go, you are already familiar with the value that search engines provide for their users.

What you may not have exposure to though, is the other side of the search engine coin. This side, the web development side, is how we reach potential customers.

By communicating to search engines via your custom website, local search citations, social media and reviews, we can work our way into the results pages and in front of customers.

Search Engines are important and you can learn more about them in this article. Trying to appear on search can be overwhelming so we have a proven strategy for local businesses that make this gargantuan task much more feasible. You can read about it here.

Keep search engines in mind as we go through each of these items. Let's dig in!

🔧 Essential Web Strategy Item #1: A Well-Performing website

2. define well performing by a few metrics
    3. communicates your brand + USP
    4. call to action that converts
    5. technical performance, seo, acc, bp 

Why is your website the most important part of your digital presence?

It may seem like you can get by without a website these days. Certainly many businesses do. Instead of having a site built at all, they ignore the (link) problem of getting a website and opt for a simple facebook page instead.

This is... just fine. That is, if you don't have growth goals for your business or aren't convinced that you need to build a web presence at all.

But if you have any desire to grow your business online, it's imperative that you have a website. Let's discuss a few reasons why having a website is a must for building out your digital and online presence.

Your Website is a Jumping off point for search engines & Search Engines lead to users.

(article: what are search engines and how do they work and why should I care?)

What your website gives you that social media sites alone do not give you (when the website is built correctly) is a totally blank slate for expressing your business's values from the ground up.

Your website can be structured optimally for your unique business in ways that a social media site, which is built for letting millions of people express themselves in nearly identical ways, simply cannot do.

This has both very technical and very customer-centric consequences, both of which are directly linked to how well your web presence manifests. Let's take a look at each.

Technical Consequences of Using a Website vs Alternatives (or No Website at All)

The biggest technical reason to use a website is entirely centered around the idea of search engines. If you don't feel you understand search engines at a basic level, read this article.

Search engines are responsible for allowing your potential customers to find your website when they search for branded or non-branded keywords. This is every bit as important as it seems.

When you employ a custom designed, optimized website, you are leveraging the ability to communicate with the search engines in very technical, transparent ways that fill their databases with specific knowledge of your business, your location and what it is that you are about.

The power of websites is that this communication is unfettered. The amount you can communicate with the search engine is virtually unlimited. All it takes is the effort and understanding - the why - to do so in the first place.

And of course, it needs to be implemented correctly or the search engine won't understand what you are trying to tell it. This idea is the basis of Search Engine Optimization - a massive field of expertise.

When you use only a social media platform to do the job of a website, the results on search are often less than desired. Read on to learn about the more obvious ways that a website benefits your business.

Customer Centered Consequences of Using a Website vs Alternatives (or No Website at All)

When you employ a properly built website, you invite your users to engage with you very directly in an environment that you have total control of. If your goal is to get them to fill out a form and submit it to you, then you can build your site to lead them to that form.

If your goal is to push toward purchase of a product online, you can gently (or aggressively if you like) nudge them in that direction. These are called 'calls to action' and are crucial to your web strategy. For more information on these specifically, read this article.

More important than the fact that you can build your unique sales funnel is that you have total control over the information that is communicated. This is often a very subtle point that encompasses a lot of ideas like branding and marketing. These are often poorly understood.

What is important to understand is very basic. The point of your website, and the biggest leverage it provides, is to communicate the specific ideas that you understand deeply about your business directly to your customer.

These ideas should be things like your business's unique value proposition - what it is that your customer can get no other place but from you, and your values, what you stand for and why you are the only logical choice for the service or product you provide.

The power of a custom website is that it allows you to have very fine control over what is communicated to your potential customers and how it is communicated. This is the modern day version of having the ability to craft the very best possible sales pitch and deliver it to anyone, anywhere in the world.

Though this power can be overwhelming, it is important for business owners to remember that they don't have to compete with the entire internet full of similar businesses.

The power of Local Web's approach is that we build your web infrastructure so that you dominate your local environment. For more specific deep dive into this strategy, read this article.

🔨 Essential Web Strategy Item #2: Local Search Results Placement

Local Search is Influenced by More than just your website

Earlier we discussed the importance of a website as it involves how your small business shows up in a search engine, specifically in local searches.

This ability to show up in local searches is a portion of the ultimate goal of your website, but there are many other things that you should also be doing in order to maximize your digital efforts.

The biggest way to influence local search results outside of your website communicating with the search engine is to leverage local business citations. Citations are essentially just business listings (like you might have had in the yellow pages or newspapers of old) that let people know that your business exists.

Getting Your Business Listed is Crucial

The way that these listings work is that there are hundreds of sites out there that provide lists of businesses to the public. Many of these sites focus on local businesses.

But in order to let the listing site know that your business exists, you have to communicate with them very specifically (just like you have to communicate with the search engine).

This translates into a lot of work - submitting your business listing information, typically your business name, address, website link and phone number among others, to each and every listing site you can think of.

The more listing sites that have your information, the more evidence the search engines will have of your existence and the more likely you are to show up in search results.

Because this is such a labor intensive thing to do, many businesses just don't do it at all. This leads to many an opportunity for businesses that can manage to get their business listed on hundreds of these sites (hint: that's exactly what Local Web Co. Does!!)

🪛 Essential Web Strategy Item #3: Appropriate Social Media Presence

Social media platforms provide valuable spaces for you to interact with your customers.

They also may present opportunities to engage with target audience (think potential customers) in ways that they are very comfortable with already because they trust the platform.

The other major reason that you need to build out your social platforms is that these platforms have a high level of trust with the search engines - an idea called Domain Authority. The higher level of trust, the more a link from their website to yours will influence a search engine that you are a valuable link.

Let's discuss both reasons why you need to be thinking about social media.

Social Media as a Customer Engagement Platform

It may be easier to get potential customer's attention in a place they already are than to try to get them to go directly to your website first. Social channels are great for convincing cold leads that your website is worth a visit in the first place - where you can then walk them through you very specific sales funnel.

Social Media Provides Evidence that your Business Exists (in the eyes of Search Engines and Customers)

Existence on social media is a necessary facet of modern business and a proper online presence strategy.

Validation for people who are searching for you.

If you have multiple accounts, and a website, you can dominate the SERPS.

Choosing The Correct Platforms Matters

Different businesses will naturally tend towards different social media platforms. Others won't make sense at all. Choosing one that has no connection with your target demographic can lead to spending lots of time and money and seeing very little result for your effort. Conversely, choosing the right Social Media Platform will open the door to make valuable connections with people who would otherwise never get the chance to interact with your business.

🪚 Reputation Management

Social Proof is necessary and must be managed carefully

Whenever I am searching for a new product or service online, the first thing I do is read as many reviews by people who have used the product or service as possible. I am not the only one who does this. (get statistic)% of people read reviews before making a purchase decision. This is the entire basis of Google Maps Business profiles - the review rating is how people find businesses they can trust.

For this reason, it is an absolutely essential

If you use these at all, you must to them right.

Doing any of these the wrong way is not just a mistake that no one will notice.

It can be deceiving to think that if you mess up any of these, the largeness of the web will probably just mask your mistake and hide any consequences. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What Happens if you do your website the wrong way

Getting the Citations Wrong

Dangers of having a vacant Social Media Account

Living with Bad Reviews - Ouch!

These aren't just fear tactics- unfortunately, we have seen first hand the negative effects of small business owners having poor websites or social accounts. It's important to give each of these the appropriate weight as a business decision. Counterintuitively, it is often better to not have a website at all than to have a poorly built one.

Essential Web Strategy Summary

Why You Need to Embrace these 4 individual parts of the modern web strategy.

We've covered a lot in this article- from why your custom-engineered website is the foundation of the modern small business web strategy to how search engine placement is the ultimate objective, how we can achieve such results and how important social media and reputation management is for reinforcing these search engine results.

Let's touch on each again briefly.

Local Search Engine Placement is how You reach users.

This idea is the central theme that links each of the four essential components to a web strategy together. By correctly using each of the four essential parts, we can find our small business's place in local search results and reach the stream of customers that already use these huge digital platforms.

Your Website is the foundation of your business's online presence.

Your Custom Website is the way that you communicate exactly what your business is about to both local customers and with the search engines. Its a hugely powerful device that must be done right!

Local Business Citations are a valuable source of Evidence that your business exists

There exist hundreds of local business listing websites that are happy to freely list a link to your business's website. The trouble is, it takes a lot of work to submit and maintain your business info on these listing websites. You know what they say - if you are willing to do what others are not, you can make a lot of money.

Social Media Encourages Customer Engagement and Also Confirms you exist

Engagement with Customers online is a great feature of the modern web. It would be a shame to miss out. Leveraging social media has multiple benefits. Search engine companies have a high trust level for social media companies, so getting a link from social accounts that point to your website increases your local search engine placement.

Reputation Management Gives Vital Social Proof that you Do What You say your going to.

People make purchasing decisions based largely on how other people have percieved the value of a business's products or services. Leveraging positive reviews from your satisfied customers takes some effort but the payoff can be tremendous.

Doing any of these the wrong way is worse than not doing them at all.

With any of these, there is a danger that they will be done the wrong way - a website that represents you poorly and gives potential customers a bad impression, empty social media accounts do a similar thing, listings that are sending out the wrong information, or negative customer reviews - all can put your business on the wrong side of the world of local web presence.

So make sure that you hire the right agency to do the best job when building a small business web presence strategy!

thanks for reading - your neighbors at Local Web Co.