Small Business, Doing Too Much With Your Website

Simplify Your Website.
Sometimes small businesses try to do too much with their website. I want to suggest that small businesses  simplify what service or products they offer on their web site. I'm not suggesting that websites should highlight only one product. I am suggesting, for small businesses, it is beneficial to concentrate content on one service or product area. Although it might mean creating two web sites to handle different business services, it can be beneficial.

How Can It Help:

Why should you limit your website's scope?

1. To improve your search rankings
2. To convince users that they arrived at the correct location
   

When someone performs a search, Google pays attention to a website's overall content. They also determine who is linking to your site and in what context.

Do you have a small business site that covers two or three broadly related services? You might be better served creating two or three sites each dedicated to one of those unique services.

When someone clicks on a link from an organic search, they will see a website which deals primarily with the service or product related to what they searched for. This makes them more likely to scan and read the web page they landed on. That is the first step towards having them view other pages on your site and learn more about your company. Hopefully that will mean more customers.

A Real Life Example:

One of my friends from a networking group is a photographer, who does weddings, portraits, commercial, and underwater photography. He built his own website, a year or so ago, with front page. (His budget does not yet allow for him to pay for a professionally designed/ build site.) The website does a decent job marketing all these services and  has follows many of the basic SEO best practices.Is has a page Rank of 2 and descent content targeting keyword phrases that are appropriate for his business.

The Problem:

The website does not show up in any of the top pages when one does a search for wedding photography in the state or city where the studio is locate. With under 110K results returned by Google I would expect his site to show up

The website pages mention the location of the studio and he has several pages dedicated to wedding photography.

Proposed solution:

I am suggesting that the website be split into two sites, one for wedding and portrait photography, the other for commercial and underwater work.

This way there will be two sites each, each with more "authority" and content on a narrower scope than the original web site.

I'm talking to the photographer in a couple of days. If we make theses changes I'll report back what the results were.