Small Business Marketing News

How Small Companies Can Improve Website Engagement

Written by Tim Morral
Published: 7/10/2014

Encouraging website visitors to take action can be challenging. Formstack offers four tips to help small businesses without IT departments improve website engagement.

Traffic is important for small business websites. But traffic alone won't guarantee success in the digital space. Why? Because getting visitors to your site is only half the battle--the other half is website engagement, i.e. encouraging visitors to take action after they land on the site.

Improving Small Business Website Engagement

Small businesses often struggle in the area of website engagement, largely because they lack the IT resources found in larger organizations. But according to the online form building provider, Formstack, there are several strategies small companies without IT departments can use to improve engagement.

  1. Responsive Web Design. With more than half of all Web traffic originating from mobile devices, it's important to make sure customers can navigate your site via mobile. Yet, according to a recent study, 91 percent of small business websites lack mobile optimization. Responsive design bridges the gap by delivering high quality experiences for both mobile and laptop users. Responsive site builder tools with easy-to-use features include Weebly and Squarespace.
  2. Online Form Builders. Online form builders allow you to quickly embed customized forms right into your website--a big advantage because 62 percent of small businesses report that online forms increased their conversion rates. In many cases, online forms integrate with email marketing solutions, CRMs and other applications to further streamline data capture and customer follow up routines. Take a look at Formstack for accessible form-building solutions.
  3. Landing Page Builders. Landing page builders make it easier to create, track and leverage unique landing pages. High quality landing page builders also allow you to perform A/B testing to discover which types of content, designs and offers are most effective at engaging site visitors and inspiring them to take the next step. Services like Unbounce and Instapage may provide the right fit for your needs.
  4. Tracking and Analytics. Tracking and analytics solutions are critical for analyzing bounce rates, abandonment rates, conversions and other key variables. Tracked data can then be compared to industry standards to evaluate how well your site performs against the competition. For most small businesses, Google Analytics is a great place to get started.

The process of improving website engagement never ends. But by implementing a handful of solutions that are designed specifically for small businesses, you can jumpstart engagement and give your business an edge over competitors that ignore how well their sites perform against key engagement targets.

Share this article

 


About Our News for Small Business Owners

Our team publishes news articles for entrepreneurs five days a week. Our entrepreneur news articles review trends in business management, analyze the impact of new government policies, present relevant entrepreneurial research findings, and cover many other topics of interest to entrepreneurs.


Additional Resources for Entrepreneurs

Lists of Venture Capital and Private Equity Firms

Franchise Opportunities

Contributors

Business Glossary