How to Easily Create a Quality Website for Your Pet Biz on a Budget
When you’re building your pet service business, there are many moving parts that require your attention. Adding a website to that mix may not seem like a good idea, but a quality website is actually one of the most important investments you can make in your business—luckily, that investment doesn’t need to break the bank.
Read on to learn why you need a website for your pet business, as well as 7 steps you can take to easily set up an amazing website on a budget.
Why Do You Need a Website for Your Pet Biz?
Think of your website like a salesperson that never clocks out and never takes a day off. Your website, if designed strategically, can walk someone through the entire sales process while you’re sleeping.
A potential customer can land on your website and learn:
- What services you offer
- Why they should work with you
- The background of your company and what makes you special
- What other customers have to say about your business
- What the process of working with you is like
- How to contact you
Not only does your website pitch your services, but it also helps you build authority in your space. By having a well-put-together website, you look and feel like a professional. Plus, you can publish content on your website that proves you have the knowledge and skills to offer your service.
A website also gives you more control over your marketing efforts in a way that a social media platform can’t. Your social media account and all of your followers belong to the platform that you’re posting on, but your website—and all of the subscribers and clients you gain from it—belong only to you.
7 Steps to Create a Website
1. Choose a Website Hosting Service or Website Builder
The first step to building a website is to decide where and how you’re going to build it. You have two options for websites: build your own website using a hosting platform and content management system or use a website builder.
With a hosting platform like Dreamhost or GoDaddy, you’ll need to pay a fee to host on their servers. Once you obtain hosting, you’ll then need to choose another platform to build your website with. Wordpress is the most popular option, but there are other options to choose from.
While this method will be more expensive upfront, it does give you more flexibility to scale your website down the line if your business grows.
The easiest and most cost-effective way is to set up your website, however, is to use a website builder like Squarespace or Wix.
Using these platforms, you can drag and drop features into your website’s pages and easily edit the copy without needing to learn coding or to hire a website developer.
2. Register Your Domain Name
No matter what option you choose for building your website, you will need to purchase and register a domain name.
Website builders like Wix and Squarespace offer free domain names, but they’re all branded with the platform’s name like yourwebsite.wix.com. While this can technically work, it doesn’t give you the professionalism and authority that your own domain name will.
Luckily, domain names can be inexpensive to purchase. You can buy one through your hosting or website builder platform, or you can source one from another platform like NameCheap.
When you choose your domain name, make sure it’s easy to read, easy to remember, and represents your business well. If possible, adding a keyword into the domain name will provide additional search engine optimization (SEO), which will help bring in more traffic to your website.
For example, "The Perfect Paws" may be your business name, but if you make your domain name perfectpawspetsitting.com, then you’ve added the keyword “pet sitting” into the domain. This makes it more likely that your website will pop up in Google if someone near you searches for pet sitting.
3. Pick a Clean, Easy-to-Use Template
Depending on the method you chose to set up your website, your template options will be different. In some cases, like with Squarespace, you start out with one master template that you can edit and change to match your branding. Other sites, like Wix and Wordpress, offer free templates to choose from.
Always choose a website design that’s easy to navigate and not cluttered with text or images. You want to make it as easy as possible for potential customers to learn more about your services and contact you if they’re interested.
Keep your color choices to a minimum (1 main color, and 1-2 accent colors), and use only 1-2 fonts throughout the entire website.
4. Create the Essential Pages on Your Website
Once you have the website created, you need to add website copy that best explains who you are and what you do. To make sure you’re getting the most out of your website, consider creating these pages at minimum:
- Homepage
- About Us page
- Services page
- An FAQ page
- A page for reviews or testimonials
- Policies page that lists your payment options, cancellation policies, and more
- Contact Us page
These pages will communicate all the necessary information that a potential customer will need to know about your business before making the decision to work with you.
5. Create an Email Address for Your Website
Many web hosting services and website builders have an option to purchase an email address that’s connected to your domain name. While this may seem like an additional expense, it’s a great idea to spend a few additional dollars.
With a branded email address, you can have a dedicated place for your customers to contact you that feels trustworthy. It also gives you an opportunity to start building an email list and use email marketing to expand your reach and grow your business.
6. Track the Traffic Coming to Your Website
The best way to make sure your website is working for you is to keep tabs on your analytics.
While your website provider may have an internal analytics dashboard, Google Analytics is going to give you the best picture of how many people are visiting your website, and how they’re finding your website.
Google Analytics is free to use, and they also offer free training on how to set up the software and navigate through all of the information.
7. Track the Activity on Your Website
In addition to tracking how and where your website traffic is coming from, you can also track their activity across your website. This helps you better understand what the user experience of your website is like, if parts of your website are frustrating, and where your customers navigate to the most.
Free sites like Hotjar offer heatmap data as well as screen recordings of real users navigating your website.
Are You Ready to Set Up Your Website?
Building your business website may seem overwhelming, but there are many tools that can make the process quick and easy. With minimum upfront costs, a bit of research, a little creativity, focus, and dedication, you can create a well-built website that attracts quality leads and pays for itself!
