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
-
Http to https for large ecommerce - our steps taken (any others recommended?)
**Here is the message from our technical team for the http to https migration; are there any other http to https migration steps recommended? ** Http to https migration steps (for this large ecommerce site): We implemented HTTPS (HTTP over TLS) protocol today (5/4/2017). Applied a patch to ensure that HTTPS pages did not have NoIndex, NoFollow and tested before and after . Added new IIS HTTPS Redirect to enforce HTTPS from HTTP and changed others, including the WWW redirect Changed HTTPS only for Cookies as required as per new PCI vulnerabilities Changed the Basepage HTML template to use Relative Paths or Absolute URLs with HTTPS only (to prevent mixed content) Created and ran a SQL Script to cleanup 16 tables from HTTP to HTTPS (about 20,000 of them, including internal URL links, site settings, etc) Ran Google Sitemap Generator to create new sitemaps with HTTPS Added new HTTPS instance of the site into Webmaster Tools, then added verification code to master page, verified and then submitted the sitemaps to Search Console (QUESTION: will historical data in Google Console/ WMT be preserved for https?) **Follow up steps for http to https migration for large ecommerce: ** From this point forward, to avoid “mixed content”, the Marketing team must use either Relative Paths or Absolute Paths with HTTPS only in any customization (i.e. Basepage) or any new link, such as created in Content Management (i.e. Long Description). Any mixed content will make the website look not secure to customers and search engine spiders – so it is very important to be disciplined and diligent about this. Contact Salesforce to change the protocol to HTTPS only. Meanwhile, to prevent mixed content, we put in a temporary custom javascript change as workaround – but this should not be permanent especially as to the next upgrade will remove it – so we need Saleforce to make a change ASAP. We did not change Blog site (on sub domain), but we should even though it is only a Content site because it will not be signaled as Secure. This means we need to have someone make the changes to WordPress to enforce HTTPS and then change any links. In terms of impact to page ranking due to Google’s treatment of HTTPS over HTTP and due to some impact to page speed – we will need to monitor closely to see how indexing, organic traffic and page ranking goes and take any additional actions as necessary.
Technical SEO | | seo20170 -
Recommendations on social bookmarking sites
I usually do social bookmarking on stumbleupon, scoop.it, pinterest, bundlr, folkd, diigo, reddit and delicious. Does anyone have any recommendation on other good social bookmarking sites?
Technical SEO | | Armen-SEO0 -
Domain change recommendations
We recently migrated one of our websites to a new domain. Obviously we were expecting a decrease in traffic initially, but it has actually gone down by 70% week-over-week since we made the switch. We set up a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain, changed all internal links to the new domain and changed all inbound links that we owned to the new domain. Our research suggested the best way to approach a domain change was by keeping it simple and not making too many changes at once. So my questions are: 1. Are these the kinds of results we should expect initially after a domain change? And if not, 2. What are the steps we should take from here? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | gouldtr0 -
Two sides of my business
Hi, I have a website for my business which does nicely in the rankings. I have recently created a new separate website to target a specific niche area and have put this under a different URL. I'm going for a whole different look, feel, style and layout here so didn't want to just add a new page to my existing site. The content between the new and existing sites is 95% different, although my contact details (phone, email, address, etc) and some images/logos are the same. WIll Google mind this at all? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MagicianUK0 -
New small business.. brand or keyword rich domain?
With so many keyword rich domains in circulation is there actually little option for small business right now other than to use keyword rich domains themselves e.g. (businessname)(keywords).com instead of brand e.g. (businessname.com) where competitors are using keyword rich domains and ranking high? It could be a mis-perception on my part, but, unless you have a very old non keyword domain name, if you don't have a keyword rich domain name in a competitive market you will struggle to succeed unless you have a serious SEO budget. Unless you are the next Google/Facebook/Pepsi isn't branding just a load of BS ? We are ourselves are in a predicament about which domain to use for our own website design business. We have a brand name domain name which is a 4 char domain but we also have a brand+keyword domain and are not 100% which one to use as our primary domain. Perhaps we can use the brand domain as our primary domain and then use the brand+keyword domain as an appropriately constructed single page promotional site, perhaps with unique content which links back to the brand domain? Good idea / Bad idea? I guess the overriding question is, if the content is good enough is the domain name you choose irrelevent to some extent?
Technical SEO | | NeilD0 -
Can anyone recommend a good template club for joomla
Hi, i am looking for a good template club for joomla. I am looking for a template club that offers magazine and news style templates which are optimised and are not slow. A template i have been using has been reported as running slow and i want to change our template. any help would be great.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
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 -
For a UK business where there is no .co.uk or .com opportunity, is it better to have a .net address or would .uk.com be better? Or no difference...This company is UK focussed only.
We have a niche keyword domain possibility but I am not sure which way, if any, is better. The .com and .co.uk options are not available but there are various other ones - including .org, .net, .uk.com. Is there any domain/seo benefit of one version over another? Any thought gratefully received..
Technical SEO | | cpdigital10