It’s a fact that as a small business owner you have a whole lot of things that you have to do, often all at the same time. That’s why it can be a little overwhelming to have to also worry about increasing traffic and visibility on places like Google as well as with other search engines. Fortunately, there are a few minor technical improvements you can make to help increase the traffic coming into your site and enhance your experience in general.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics has the advantage of being a free solution that can greatly enhance your online business. By signing up for it, you’ll be able to get free statistic tracking for your website including which pages people are connecting to the most, how many seconds they spend on each page in general, and what they click on and how they spend their time on your site. Different services will obviously have different things that they track, but this is the commonality between them. Depending on exactly what service you use, you can even get services like seeing videos of exactly what people are doing on your site, or statistics based on which links are clicked the most often, and when they are clicked. This is extremely useful because it allows you to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. If people are clicking on a particular link at the top of the page, but ignoring links below the “fold,” so to speak, than this certainly tells you something about how to improve your site, as well as what types of visitors you’re getting.
Local Profiles
Another technical tweak you can use that will certainly help certain companies is setting up local profiles. This is especially the case if you have a business that focuses on selling something locally, such as a restaurant. You can open a profile somewhere like Google Places. Other people might add information about your business too, but if you can prove that you own the business you can add information that’s actually correct, and get rid of any information that isn’t. Connecting this to your Google+ account is a good idea as well. You can add pictures for your business and if you play your cards right, you can get added to the Google carousel of pictures relevant to any search inquiries. Many experts on the web these days are saying that winning the local search game is what will give you the most bang for your buck.
Mobile Design
The number of mobile phones that people get these days is staggering. This trend is only going to increase over the coming years, so it definitely pays to stay on top of it by making sure that your site is mobile friendly. Overall, if someone navigates to your site with a mobile device and finds something that isn’t mobile friendly, chances are that they will navigate away from it. Sites for a regular PC don’t really always fit very well on mobile devices unless you take extra care to make sure they will, after all. There are a lot of companies that will help you make sure that your mobile version is up to speed, and this is often worth the effort to pull off.
You can also use sites like the 1and1 small business website to get extra help if you’re stuck, or any site in the same category. There are also plenty of sites out there like 1and1 that will take you all the way through the process if you feel like you don’t know where to begin.