Any recommendations for small businesses
-
I'm currently helping a bunch of small business owners with using internet marketing SEO etc. A couple of them are just starting out and cant afford to pay for someone to build the site for them etc.
If someone wants to use one of these Free / cheap websites (live vistaprint, 123 reg, Moonfruit, etc), which one would you recommend? Are any any better and giving the foundations to build some decent rankings on?I
Do the ones where you drag and drop to build the site normally create a flash site?
Has anyone done a study on which ones work best?
Any recommendations would be appreciated.
Ant
-
Thanks Egol and Keri for your replies. Really helpful and much appreciated.
Ant
-
If they have a little bit more to spend, I'd recommend EGOL's suggestion above, and then to look at something like page.ly for hosting. The basic WP hosting there is about $25 a month, and they take care of all of the upgrades for you. I worked with it once a couple of years ago, and it was the easiest WP install I've ever done.
-
I have not looked at vistaprint or moonfruit but those types of systems are generally awful for SEO.
If I knew a person who had a tiny business and needed a website I would point them towards a wordpress site using a template. Then they can focus 100% on the content and easily change or improve the design in the future.
They might need some help getting started, so there could be a small expense and a learning curve - but you will have that with anything.
I would also register a domain and have the wordpress on my own hosting. This cost is very small - probably under $100/year.
In the end you have your website on a platform that is very versatile, functional, well supported, and can easily get experts to improve it when you are ready.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google My Business Service Area Question
Hello Moz Friends I just wanted to make sure I'm doing things correctly. On google my business your given the option to list your service area. I serve the entire state of Colorado with my internet marketing services. So I listed Colorado as my service area. but Moz Friends, is this the wrong idea? Like should I list the major cities and call it good? So instead of service area Colorado, I should put Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo etc Thank you for your friendly help Chris
Technical SEO | | asbchris0 -
Structured data and Google+ Local business page are conflicting
Hi, A few (almost 8 now) months ago we have added structured data to our website. which according to the testing tool should work. (Our url: https://www.rezdy.com) However when searching for our company name, our old local business page from Google+ shows up. I have reached out to google to tell them that we aren't a local business anymore and want the data from the page to be removed. But this all takes painfully long. I want my search result to be shown like the large businesses (examples: Adroll, Hubspot), including logo, twitter feed etc. etc. Will this all work, if so, is there a way to speed up the process, any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | Niek_Dekker1 -
Recommended log file analysis software for OS X?
Due to some questions over direct traffic and Googlebot behavior, I want to do some log file analysis. The catch is this is a Mac shop, so all our systems are on OS X. I have Windows 8 running in an emulator, but for the sake of simplicity I'd rather run all my software in OS X. This post by Tim Resnik recommended Web Log Explorer, but it's for Windows only. I did discover Sawmill, which claims to run on any platform. Any other suggestions? Bear in mind our site is load balanced over three servers, so please take that into consideration.
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0 -
To many links on page. Big or small issue for eCommerce
On my site I have around 3k pages and about 90 categories. Most of which have a sensible number of products but some have only a few products and some have loads. if I have say 40 links on the page ignoring the producand is it a big problem if I have more than 60 products on the page? Assuming a link limit per page of 100 user wise we have filters and sorts for thme to find what they breed without issue. But simply from an seo point of view how damaging would I be to have the 23 "to many links on page issues? Worth fixing by making two categories and splitting out products even tho it would hinder the user.
Technical SEO | | mark_baird0 -
How to create unique content for businesses with multiple locations?
I have a client that owns one franchise location of a franchise company with multiple locations. They have one large site with each location owning it's own page on the site, which I feel is the best route. The problem is that each location page has basically duplicate content on each page resulting in like 80 pages of duplicate content. I'm looking for advice on how to create unique content for each location page? What types of information can we write about to make each page unique, because you can only twist sentences and content around so much before it just all sounds cookie cutter and therefore offering little value.
Technical SEO | | RonMedlin0 -
Hcards - Business or Personal?
Hi All, To my knowledge, Hcards for rich snippets are generally used by bloggers etc. I would like to use the business logo rather than a photo of myself, as well as the business twitter, G+ local profiles and Bio for the business. The Author page will be the "about us" page with info about the company. Is this OK? Or does it have to be personal?
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets0 -
Multiple site in one? Recommendations?
I have 2 companies that essential do the same thing. They have different names and different domain names. One is a USA company and the other is a South American Company. My intnent was to create a single site with both english and spanish content and then create a english home page and a spanish homepage. I was hoping to direct the spanish domain name to the spanish homepage and the english to the english homepage. This way I will only have one site to maintain - one ecommerce site to maintain and can direct teh links to a single site - although they will essentially be kinda different. My question is... what are the pluses and minuses of doing this? Would I better creating 2 separate sites? is there going to be an issue with google maybe seeing duplicate content although the pages are seperate for each language? Any other considerations that I just wasnt smart enough to think of?
Technical SEO | | brantwadz0 -
Linking to related business?
If your working with a local business, is it a good idea to reach out to similar businesses in other states and ask for a link? Example: I own a paint shop in Minnesota, and I reach out to a paint shop in California to see if we want to link to each others site to help our SEO. Because we aren’t in competition with each other wouldn’t this help us both?
Technical SEO | | marker-3115280