3 Simple Steps to Improve Your Local Website

Most of the web sites I see local businesses use are 5 page sites set-up something like:

  • Home Page
  • About Us
  • Services
  • Page Under Construction
  • Contact Us

Now let’s take 3 simple steps to improve this site’s visibility and conversions.

Clean up the Website

Obviously, you’ll want to get rid of the page under construction. Next, check for broken links and fix those. Then read your website again… make sure it reads well and clean up any grammar and spelling issues. Now we can get to the fun stuff.

Break Out Your Services Page

The typical website layout described above with tongue in cheek is actually a good start for local businesses, that’s why it’s so popular. Home Page, About Us and Contact Us pages are essential for a local business. I would add to that list a Privacy Policy but that’s a post for another day.

But the services page needs to be changed and here’s how to do it. For each service you have as a bulleted item on that page, create a seperate page and remove the services page.

For Example, a house painter with a services page listing Exteriors, Interiors and Power Washing should create a new page titled Exterior Painting, another for Interior Painting and a third for Power Washing. The bulleted items on these pages should list the benefits of doing business with you. Explain why a local searcher should choose you over the competition.

This will give your site a much better chance of showing up in the search engines for these keywords but more importantly it will help you convert searchers to customers.

Focus on Usability

Now despite all that hard work a lot of your visitors are still going to arrive at your site via the home page. They want to find the one thing they’re looking for quickly, so help them out. Make the navigation to these newly created pages prominent. It should be very easy for your customers to find the things they want to buy. Don’t make it hard it and frustrate them into using the back button. Put focus on these links… you can use a different color or the best way might be to highlight the link with a graphic that depicts that service. Also put the links in a prominent section of the home page.

Adapting these steps to your website should increase it’s visibility and conversion. Please let me know.