How small business websites can compete with larger competitors
Do you worry about being able to keep up with the big companies that seem to be everywhere on the internet? Are you skeptical about gaining online market share against your biggest competitors?
As a small or medium-sized business, you’ve likely expressed these feelings at some point. Not to worry, though, we’ve got you covered. We’re going to show you how you can compete with larger companies and brands online.
Competing against larger, more established businesses online starts with building a proper website. Next, you’re going to want to look into a guide on small business hosting. Then, you’re going to want to research your online competition.
Step 1: Build a great website
Your website is your business’ face on the internet. Therefore, you want to build a site that not only looks great, but that provides excellent user experience and encourages users to become customers. To create a great website, you should do the following:
Create smart and measurable goals
What do you want your site to achieve? Do you want to increase conversion rates, generate leads, increase sales, improve brand awareness, or reduce overhead? Great websites are designed to achieve goals, so make sure you know what yours are before getting started.
Study up on SEO
Search engine optimization is the key to achieving a high ROI. When done right, SEO will bring customers to your site, freeing you up to focus on the quality of your business. So make sure you’re up to date with the latest innovations in SEO.
Choose open-source tools
If you choose a proprietary content management system, you’ll have to pay large hefty license fees, and you’ll be stuck with one company. It will also limit you to what a developer can customize. For this reason, you should go with an open-source system like WordPress or Magento.
Come up with a mobile strategy
According to Statista.com, in 2019, 52.6% of website traffic came from mobile devices. Therefore, you’d be wise to ensure that your site is mobile friendly. This could mean building a separate mobile version of your website or even an app.
Cultivate content
Content is king. Regardless of the purpose of your site, you’ll need content and lots of it. For example, if you’re selling products, you’ll need product descriptions and visuals. Or, if you’re providing a service, you’ll need explanations and descriptions of what you offer and how it can benefit customers.
Develop calls to action
A call to action is what drives site visitors to take action, like making a purchase or signing up for emails. You’re going to want to write compelling calls to action to incentivize your visitors to become customers.
Step 2: Choose a good hosting plan
A web hosting service provider is a business that supplies the necessary technology and services for a website to be visible on the internet. The right hosting plan can help you compete against larger companies by providing you with the right speed and resources. There are several hosting options to choose from. Selecting the best one for your site will depend on what you need to compete. Let’s review the hosting options:
Shared hosting
With this hosting plan, multiple websites share one server. As a result, performance can sometimes suffer as your site grows. Therefore, it’s ideal for small websites and businesses with low traffic.
VPS
This hosting plan is similar to Shared Hosting, but the server is divided into virtual machines that act as independent servers. Therefore, you have more resources and greater performance than with a Shared Hosting plan.
Dedicated hosting
Dedicated hosting gives you your own server all to yourself and is the only way to guarantee the best performance for your site. This is because you don’t share any resources or storage with anyone else.
To guarantee that your site can compete with larger competitors, you’ll want to make sure that your website doesn’t get slow or go down. With Shared Hosting, there is a higher chance that the traffic of another site will affect you. Therefore, you’ll want to go with either VPS or Dedicated Hosting.
Step 3: Know your competitor
Your competitor is not just the business with the best looking site. The companies you want to keep an eye on are the ones that are dominating the search pages for the keywords related to your business. These sites are high on the search results list because they are producing quality content and getting their audience to engage with their content. You’ll need to know who these businesses are to compete against them effectively. Once you’ve found out who your competitors are, you’ll want to analyze their sites and online presence to determine what you can do better to compete with them.
