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• 5 Ways to Make the WordPress Site for Your Small Business Stand Out in the Crowd

5 Ways to Make the WordPress Site for Your Small Business Stand Out in the Crowd

You need to make your website stand out from the crowd for it to be effective.

With approximately 75 million websites powered by WordPress, there is no denying that the WordPress site you create for your small business will have some competition. With its status as the world’s most popular CMS, WordPress sites are viewed by more than 409 million people each month. Make sure that out of all those eyes looking at WordPress pages each month, as many as possible are looking at yours. Ensure that the WordPress site for your small business is able to differentiate itself from its competitors and generate traffic that will remember your brand and revisit your site in the future.

1. Select a memorable domain name

The domain name that you select for your WordPress site should be one that is brandable. It needs to be something that people can easily associate with your business’s brand (and only your brand) and by which they can remember your brand in the future. Ensure that you do not register a domain name that is similar to that of a competitor so that you can avoid having people end up on their site rather than yours. Also, choose a domain name that relates to your brand so that your brand has an opportunity to be remembered and recognized later on when someone interacts with your domain name.

Make your domain name simple to pronounce, spell, and type so that the chances of people ending up at the wrong site when trying to access it are lessened. To do this, make it concise and without hyphens or numerals. People often forget to include hyphens or put them in the wrong place, and with numbers, web users can be left unsure as to whether the number is supposed to be spelled out as a word.

2. Choose the right theme

A feature of WordPress that makes its process of creating your site even easier is its choice of themes for the websites it hosts. When creating your website, choose a theme for it that is different from sites similar to your own and that ties in well with the brand of your small business.

Attractiveness and relevance to your brand are not enough for your WordPress theme, however. It also must be responsive across all devices. If someone were to pull up your site on their mobile phone and find that it was improperly formatted and not usable on their device, your site would instantly lose credibility with them. You can use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test page to check and make sure that your site with a particular theme is formatted for mobile devices.

3. Start a Blog

Writing a blog and having it available on your WordPress site gives your site more engaging and shareable content, as well as more of a sense of brand identity. By writing posts for a blog, your small business is able to develop content that pertains specifically to what your target market wants. You can give them information on things they want to know about and answer questions that they have.

With a blog on your small business’s WordPress site, you can also utilize the power of guest contributors. In choosing individuals to write for your blog as a guest, you are conveying to your audience what you value as a brand and who you think represents you well. Also, by having someone new contribute to your business’s blog, you create intrigue and can generate more traffic to it that is interested in seeing what your guest author has to say and by reaching the followers of your guest contributor.

4. Utilize the Power of Social Media

Use the social media accounts of your small business to get people to your WordPress site. Include your site’s domain name in any “About Me” sections and include links to your site in your posts. Also, on your brand’s business Facebook page, use the call to action (CTA) button to draw users in. By making your CTA button something like “Learn more” or “See what’s new,” you are able to encourage the action of visiting your small business’s WordPress site over that of others in your market.

Also, use your WordPress site to drive traffic to your business’s social media accounts. By including links to your social media channels on your site, you are showcasing more of your business’s online outlets and promoting the social community that you are building with your brand.

5. Keep SEO in Mind

When people go to search engines and search for sites offering them what your WordPress site has to offer, you want your site to appear at the top of their results. In creating the WordPress site for your small business, think about its SEO.

Use keywords and phrases in your site. With an online tool like Moz, see which ones are being used by your online competition and use those in your WordPress site as well. That way, you are not left out of results pages for those searches where your competitors already hold positions. Also, set yourself apart from the crowd with the quality and shareability of the content you include on your WordPress site. The more your site is shared online by people across various channels on the web, the more it will be noticed by search engines and the better its SEO will be.

Encourage feedback on your WordPress site, too. As with people sharing your site and its content, the more online reviews you are able to gather for your website on review sites like Yelp and Foursquare, the greater your brand’s online presence and, as a result, the better your WordPress site’s SEO.

Make the WordPress site of your small business the expert in its field, or the known place to find the latest and greatest first, or the standout leader in community engagement and service. Differentiate your site from its competition by priming it for search engines and making it truly reflective of your brand. Get traffic there, then have that traffic remember your business above all the rest.