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A Beginner’s Guide to Designing a Website for a Reno Business

Voted Best Website Designer & SEO Expert

If you’re a business owner and haven’t launched a website yet, you could be missing out on a lot of traffic and possibly even sales. Today we’re going to walk you through the steps for designing a website for a Reno Business. It isn’t a daunting task at all and you could have a website in as little as a few hours!

You understand that, in order to keep pace with your competitors, grow your brand, and keep in touch with your target market, you absolutely have to have a website for your business.

What don’t you quite know just yet?

Exactly what designing a website for a Reno business should actually entail.

You’ve heard phrases like dwell time, SEO, keywords, internal and external linking, and much more thrown around.

But truth be told?

At this point, you’re only really pretending that you know what they mean. In its current form, your website looks like it could have been created around the same time that the Internet came into existence.

Or maybe it’s so over-crowded that it looks like the Worst Website of All Time.

This post is here to help you understand what to consider when working with Reno web designers to help you create the right site for your brand.

1. Start by Creating a Logo

If you haven’t even started building up a website for your business yet, then chances are that you haven’t come up with a logo design, either.

Or maybe you’ve recently changed your market, the products or services you offer, or are in the process of undergoing a re-branding.

Whatever the case may be, having the right logo design is an essential part of your overall branding strategy.

It helps people to remember your brand, it clues them off as to what you’re selling, and it even makes an emotional connection with your target market.

It’s also an awesome way to build continuity on all of your online presences and social media accounts. Your logo should be your profile pictures. It should go on the home and internal pages of your website, and it should be included on physical marketing materials as well.

In short, it will serve as an inspiration for your entire website design, especially when it comes to how your site will visually look.

What if you don’t know where to start with logo design?

Get in touch with a member of our team that specializes in logo design in Reno, NV. We’ll help you to come up with a unique, impactful, and memorable design.

Once you’ve got that sorted out?

It’s time to start focusing on your actual website design.

2. Understand SEO Basics

The first step in designing a website for a Reno business?

Making sure that your website content is optimized for search engine optimization, or SEO for short.

In the simplest terms, SEO means that you study up on search engine algorithms as well as the way that people look for what you have to offer online.

Understanding Keywords

This is most easily done through the use of keywords. Keywords are what you type into a search engine when you’re looking for a product, service, or even just an answer to a question online.

There are keywords for voice search, keywords that will target your local market, and even keywords that you can use when categorizing your video marketing content online.

The goal of these keywords is to bring the people who are the most likely to do business with you (because they’re already interested in buying what you sell) to your website.

In a later section of this post, we’ll speak more about how you can create a blog to help you develop and improve your overall keyword strategy.

But keywords are far from the only essential part of SEO.

You’ll also need to make sure that your website loads just as quickly and completely on a mobile device like a smartphone or a tablet as it does on a laptop or old-school desktop computer.

Your website should also load quickly — especially since you’ll lose about half of your traffic if your website can’t load within three seconds.

Remember that not all of your SEO strategy is going to take place on your actual website. We know that sounds confusing, but think about it.

You also want people to be directed to your website by things other than search engines.

For example, if you comment on a blog, include a link back to your own website in your comment signature. Claim your company’s listings on third-party review sites — in particular Google My Business.

Submit your website to local digital business directories, write posts for other blogs or popular industry websites, and even share your posts on social media.

You want to do everything you can to bring people in from all sides.

3. Site Navigation Matters

Have you ever been to a website whose endless scrolling format made it pretty much impossible for you to find what you needed?

What about a website that had no menu options, lots of broken links, or made it tough to find out a business’s contact information and location?

We’re willing to bet that you weren’t exactly ready to add that website to your list of favorites. In fact, it’s highly likely that you clicked away as soon as you could, and then never visited it again.

If you don’t make excellent and intuitive navigation a part of your overall website design?

Then your website will probably suffer the same fate.

That will certainly cause your website to plummet in the search engine rankings — far behind your competitors.

So, what can you do to ensure that your website is easy to navigate?

What to Improve

Start by making sure that your menu options are clear, large enough to click on, and that the fonts and colors you’ve chosen as your site theme are actually legible.

Yes, it’s pretty basic stuff — but you’d be seriously surprised by just how many people never bother to think about that.

You might also want to consider installing a chatbot, which looks like an instant messaging panel, on your homepage. This means that your customers can quickly type in the questions they have about a product or service, and get the answers they need.

You should include your contact information — as well as links to your social media sites — on every internal page of your site. You should even include a Google Map, as this will make it more likely that your business shows up in local search engine results.

If you’re a service-based business?

We strongly encourage you to make it a possibility for your visitors to schedule an appointment through your website.

Finally, always include a search bar at the top of your website.

That way, even if shoppers can’t find what they’re looking for in your menu options? All they need to do is type it in and wait to be directed to the page that has exactly what they came to your website to get.

4. The Benefits of Blogging

When you’re designing a website for a Reno business, your blog will be one of the most important things that you create.

First of all, as we referenced earlier, your blog will give you a chance to include tons of varieties of keywords on your website.

This means that you’ll be able to get more traffic and grow your market at the same time.

Additionally, if you start a blog, you’re looking at getting over 400% more indexed pages than websites without one.

This means that Google has stored 400% more information about your website than your non-blogging contenders. So, you’re much more likely to outrank them in the search engine results.

Blog posts are also highly shareable on social media, giving you yet another way to expand your overall audience.

Of course, more than anything else, writing a blog post about a topic allows you to let people know that you’re an expert in your industry. Shoppers want to know that they can come to you for advice, honest reviews, and even tutorials about how to best use a product.

Plus, writing blog posts and communicating with your readers in the comments section can also be tons of fun!

5. Internal and External Linking

If you speak with any experts on marketing in Reno, they’ll likely bring up the idea of creating an internal and an external linking strategy at some point.

Internal links are those that take those who click it to another page on your website.

This doesn’t just help you to grow your traffic and your average number of hits (which means that you’ll rank higher in the search engine results).

It also means that you can help customers find what they need, and steer them through a natural sales funnel.

For example, if you wrote a blog post explaining in detail the benefits of a new service you offer?

You should certainly include an internal link to that specific product page in the content itself.

But you don’t just want to focus on internal links. External links matter, too.

When it comes to this, you want to find a balance between linking out to non-competitor, authoritative industry websites (or related news articles) and making sure that your content is linked to by these same sites.

If you want brands and blogs to link back to your website, you should think about writing a post that collects lots of data points that people will want to reference in their own posts.

You can also simply reach out to the external sites you’ve included in your own content to let them know you’ve linked to them in your own site.

You might be surprised by just how quickly they’ll return the favor by linking back to your own website.

6. Reaching out to Reno Marketing Agencies

The final step to mastering marketing in Reno — especially when it comes to the digital side of things?

We strongly suggest that you connect with digital marketing firms in Reno.

While the options outlined in this post are all excellent places to start, the truth is that they’ll take some time to master and become as effective as they should be.

You’ll need to tweak them, update them, and ask for and implement feedback from your target market. You’ll also need to know how to use analytical tools and how to conduct site audits to take advantage of and learn from your data.

It’s a lot to do on your own.

Plus, keep in mind that this is only the beginning of your Reno-based business’s marketing strategy.

You’ll want to consider things like pay-per-click campaigns, social media marketing, reaching out to influencers, and much more.

It’s easy to fall behind, and it’s even harder to actually stick to a content creation schedule when you’re already exhausted from the work week.

So, where can find experienced and professional Reno web designers that you can trust?

Well, now that you mention it…

Let Us Help You with Designing a Website for a Reno Business

We want to be the firm that you rely on to help you master what you need to know when designing a website for a Reno business.

Whether you’re interested in taking advantage of our awesome website design skills to take your current site to the next level, or if you’d like to sign up for one of our marketing workshops?

You can count on us to consistently bring you the freshest and most fun digital marketing ideas out there today.

We’ll help you with everything from logo design to content creation and blogging.

Why let an outdated and slow-loading website hurt your company’s reputation for one more day?

When you’re ready to make a change for the better, we invite you to reach out to us to get started.

Reno SEO

Reno SEO, Marketing & Web Design | Award winning, yes, motivated for you to succeed, most certainly. 

Although we have won our fare share of design awards, (The Webby Awards) and (CSS Web Design Honor) and a few others…that is not our focus. Our goals are to impress your clients, build your business and make you fall in love with what we do.  View a sample of our custom website designs and digital marketing results in our web portfolio.