For the uninitiated, digital marketing seems to be a complex and time-consuming business strategy whose profitability is only proportional to the amount you are willing to invest in it. This tentative attitude seems to influence 45% of small businesses in the U.S. that don’t maintain a company website. Still, nobody can deny that a business website can significantly boost your sales and expand your brand’s customer market, especially when done right.

A digital marketing consulting firm took a look at the top sites in the U.S. to help identify the common denominators in each website.

Valuable daily content

In the realm of digital marketing, content is truly king. However, the top websites don’t just add another article, blog, or post every day for the sake of adding another page to their websites. It must present value to the target audience, lest their market will abandon them in droves to look for something else.

The new content must be something that answers the reader’s questions, raises awareness for topics that affect the reader, or introduces a new product or service that makes the reader’s life a bit easier.

User-generated content

The top websites—namely Google, YouTube, and Facebook—let their end-users create and post their own content. This might be in the form of blogs, vlogs (video blogs), photos, audio files, and other forms of digital media. This increases user interaction, thereby enhancing the user’s experience on your site.

Of course, user-generated content is also a solution for small businesses who simply don’t have the time or budget to post daily content on their websites. The only thing you will have to worry about is monitoring spam from user-generated content.

Simple yet high-quality website design

Most small businesses make the mistake of thinking they can create their own websites from scratch without the necessary skills or experience. Unfortunately for them, today’s online users are quite impatient with websites that either seem amateurish or get too crazily creative in their design and layout.

More users choose to do business with a company that sports a professional-looking website than those with fancy designs, complete with annoying animations and auto-playing videos.

Quality link-building

Link-building often goes hand-in-hand with content marketing. While these two terms are often used interchangeably, they don’t mean the same thing. Content marketing is when you create quality content to entice your audience to buy your product, while link-building is the result of acquiring related external links through the use of keywords to improve your search ranking. With a higher search ranking, there’s a higher probability that you’ll increase your web foot traffic and potentially convert it to sales.

If you still don’t own a company website, you best start building one now. Contact a reputable digital marketing firm to help you create your company website and plan the best online marketing strategy to promote your business.

Sources:

3 Reasons Websites Are Vital for Small Businesses, Forbes.com

What Percentage of Small Businesses Have Websites? | 2017, SmallBusiness.com

The Best Company Websites Have These 6 Things in Common, YFSMagazine.com