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Launching Your Own Website: 5 Common Mistakes Small Business Owners Make

I recently launched my own website, and it was a process that required a great deal of care and consideration. Launching a website has become substantially easier with the advent of website builders. Still, the average small business owner can make a host of mistakes along the way that could hinder their efforts and hold them back from reaching their full potential. Let's take a closer look at the five common mistakes small business owners make when building and launching a website that you should be aware of before creating your own.

1. Not Self-Hosting

Many of the website builders mentioned above essentially host your website on your behalf if you don't immediately spring for the premium plan. This might seem like it makes the entire process of launching a website easier, but it does come with some drawbacks. Choosing not to host your own website means that you'll likely have the website builder's name somewhere in your URL, which doesn't look very professional and may drive business away as you scale.

More than that, having someone else host your website means that you're at their mercy regarding any changes they make to how they operate or even the limitations of their platform. Self-hosting gives you greater freedom and a URL that doesn't have someone else's business tacked onto the end of it.

2. Attempting to Do Everything on Their Own

Some business owners are really a jack of all trades and can do nearly anything they need to for their business. Others, not so much. But I'll let you in on a secret I learned early on; you don't need to be able to do everything in your business. Being good at what you do to create the products or services you sell is your main priority.

If you're not proficient at something, you can hire someone and delegate those tasks to them. Building a website can be challenging, and refusing to use online resources or enlist the help of others almost always results in getting frustrated and hitting a wall that delays your website launch. Don't be afraid to hand off the reins to someone else when you come across a task you're unable to do on your own.

3. Failing to Optimize Content

Generating organic traffic, besides having a place where you can direct users to purchase your goods or services and learn more about you, is the point of having a website. But your website isn't going to magically get in front of internet users on its own. Implementing on-page SEO best practices is crucial to getting the top spot on search engine results pages (SERPs). If you fail to optimize at all, you won't show up on Google when users are searching for something related to your business.

If you fail to optimize properly and only follow a few of the best practices, you can end up missing out on the average 27.6 percent click-through rate that the top-ranking website enjoys. Always optimize images and add metadata, focus on long-tail keywords that your small business can rank for, and take care to conduct SEO research for every webpage and blog that you create. If you optimize your website properly, you will likely get the organic traffic that you're looking for.

4. Not Developing a Backlink Strategy

Keyword optimization is often seen as the be-all and end-all of SEO. But this is not the case. Off-page SEO is just as important as on-page SEO. Google ranks your website not only by how well your pages are optimized but also by how authoritative your website is. The more backlinks you receive from other websites that are ranked higher than you are, the more of a boost you will receive.

With that in mind, it's important to create a backlink strategy. Figure out where you can post content and receive a do-follow link, and gradually focus on websites that are ranked higher on SERPs than your own. This can be a bit trickier than other elements of managing your website. If you need to, you can always seek professional help to manage elements of SEO like this for you.

5. Forgetting to Improve User Experience With Technical SEO

At the end of the day, all the optimization in the world can't make up for poor design. Some small business owners will focus heavily on keyword optimization during the creation process before they launch and ignore the design elements. What happens? When websites are difficult to look at, slow to load (the odds of someone leaving your website increase by 32 percent when your website takes three seconds to load), and aren't able to function on mobile devices, it can drive users away. Keep in mind that your website is a representation of your business. Much like your business, you want it to look and perform its best!

Launching a website can be challenging, but there are plenty of workarounds that you can leverage and ample good advice online that will help you avoid common mistakes. Before you launch your website, conduct deep research and jot these lessons down somewhere so that you're fully confident your website is ready for the world to see.