If you’re jumping into the world of entrepreneurship, ecommerce is a smart way to go. This is especially true with the retail ecommerce market expected to hit a whopping $5.4 trillion by 2022.

But how can you compete with all the ecommerce brands out there?

One of the secrets is having the right tools. Once you find the best website builder for your small business, you’ll be able to tap into a whole world of features and resources you need to build a gorgeous, high-converting ecommerce website.

So what exactly are those tools and how do you use them? (And how much will they cost?)

In this article, we’ll look at a few of the top website builders for small businesses. We’ll discuss the platforms, what they can help you achieve, and how you should choose the one that’s best for your unique situation.

Don’t wait for someone else to do it. Hire yourself and start calling the shots.

Get Started Free 9 top small business website builders in 2021

Wondering which small business website builder to use and what you’ll get out of your subscription? Let’s break down the top options and their features to help you decide.

1. Shopify: Best overall ecommerce site builder

If you ask around, many people will tell you that Shopify is the best website builder for small business. It’s built such a positive reputation because it has a lot to offer new and experienced entrepreneurs alike.

Shopify offers thousands of free and paid pre-built themes to help you jump right into building your website—no coding experience necessary. It also has built-in tools and resources to help you run comprehensive marketing campaigns to grow your store traffic and customer base, as well as comprehensive tracking tools to keep you on track.

If you’re interested in growing into an omnichannel brand, Shopify integrates with many other channels, including social media like Facebook and TikTok, as well as online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. You can even use Shopify to sell in-person if you decide to open a storefront or host a pop-up shop at local events.

Price: Basic plan starts at $29/month, plus transaction fees.

2. GoDaddy: Best for quick-and-easy websites

You may know GoDaddy as one of the world’s biggest website hosting companies, so it would make sense that the company offers a website builder too. If you want to get up and running as soon as possible, GoDaddy is one of the best small business website builders to choose from.

The website builder offers many of the features you can expect, like a design studio for content and videos, sales and marketing management tools, and tracking metrics to make sure you hit all of your business goals.

Many users report that GoDaddy offers a bit of a trade-off: the experience is simple and streamlined, but you lose some of the customization and capabilities that are typically offered by other website builders.

Price: Basic plan starts at $9.99/month. 

3. WordPress: Best for custom web experiences

WordPress is truly a force to be reckoned with—it powers more than one-third of the world’s top 10 million websites. And as you can imagine, this means that WordPress has the benefit of a massive ecosystem. If you need a plug-in or integration, you’ll almost certainly be able to find it.

Some people say that WordPress is for “dreamers,” meaning that if you can dream up an idea for your small business website, you can accomplish it through WordPress. That’s why this website builder is a great choice if you have a website idea that requires some extra tools and customizations to bring to life.

Keep in mind, though, that the more complex a website you’d like to create, the more likelihood there is that you’ll need to hire a professional developer if you don’t already have those skills.

Price: Personal plan starts at $3, though you may want a higher-tier plan for better website functionality.

4. Squarespace: Best for beautiful, responsive websites

Squarespace is a design powerhouse with a large collection of stunning, fully responsive templates. Each Squarespace template has elements that you can customize to suit your brand, from the fonts and colors to the background images and banners. 

For small businesses, Squarespace offers the perfect blend of modern design and ease of use. It keeps site-building really simple and gives you all the necessary marketing tools to work with. Embedding popups and announcement bars is as easy as dragging and dropping them wherever you want them to appear.

Squarespace also offers ecommerce tools you can use to build an online store. These include order management, point of sale, product image zoom, and more. 

However, Squarespace has a bit of a learning curve, and it lacks some of the crucial functions of more established store builders. 

Price: Personal plan starts at $12/month. If you want fully integrated ecommerce for your website, the minimum plan is $18/month, plus transaction fees.

5. Wix: Best for extending site functionality

Wix is a solid, beginner-friendly site builder for small businesses. Its drag-and-drop feature lets you design your site by placing elements where you want them. 

Aside from typical site building, Wix offers ADI (artificial design intelligence) for less-tech-savvy business owners. This tool will ask you a few questions about your design and feature preferences, then create an attractive website for you. 

And once you’ve created a website, Wix lets you extend its functionality via its App Market. Wix has over 250 apps you can choose from if your core setup is missing the features you need. 

One thing to keep in mind is that if you’re looking to sell products online, Wix may not be the best choice. The platform allows you to add a maximum of 100 pages to your online store—and you don’t get integrations for newer channels like TikTok. 

Price: Basic plan starts at $4.50/month but includes limited features and Wix ads. You’ll probably want to start with the Personal plan, which costs $8.50/month.

6. Site123: Best for simple websites

Site123 is one of the best free website builders for small businesses. Whereas some builders give you a limited free trial to test the waters, Site123 offers a completely free plan with enough storage to host a simple website. 

When building a site, you can choose from over 180 mobile-responsive templates. And while Site123 doesn’t allow the adjustment of elements, you can reorder and add content sections to your preferences.

If you want to access Site123’s repository of plug-ins and ecommerce tools, you’ll need to sign up for its Premium plan. However, not every tool will be included in your package. The good news is that Site123 has an App Market where you’ll find several important tools not offered with your subscription. 

The one caveat is that Site123 doesn’t offer a drag-and-drop editor like some other small business website builders. Instead, you get a point-and-click editor with limited creative freedom.

Price: Basic plan is free, but you’ll need to put up with ads and limited bandwidth on your site. Ad-free plans start at $7.25/month.

7. Weebly: Best for intuitive editing

Weebly is one of the easiest website builders around. Its new editor makes it simple to edit your website’s navigation and content. You can also choose from a variety of preset layouts, plus add or remove elements according to your preferences.  On top of website building simplicity, Weebly offers a range of features to help you grow online. These include strong SEO features and support, marketing tools like coupons and newsletters, and integration with Square Payments. 

Want to create an ecommerce website? Weebly offers an intuitive store panel where you can customize your design, add inventory, manage payments, and more. Plus, you’re able to access all the built-in features meant to help you establish and scale your business online.

On the flip side, Weebly lacks the depth and power of more specialist ecommerce platforms. In building a store for the long haul, its limited capabilities might become a major stumbling block.

Price: Basic plan is free but doesn’t connect to a custom domain name. Plans that allow a custom domain start at $6/month.

8. Square Online: Best free website builder

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There are few website builders that offer completely free plans, and Square Online is one of them. You can build, launch, and drive traffic to your store at no cost.

Square Online also integrates with other channels like Facebook and Instagram, and offers SEO tools to help you continue growing your business.

Keep in mind, though, that the free version has limitations compared to paid plans from Square Online, as well as many of the competitors we’ve discussed. For example, your site will show ads that Square Online chooses, and you can’t use a custom domain like www.yourstore.com.

Of course, if you’d like more ability to customize your ecommerce experience, you can always upgrade to a paid plan.

Price: Forever free plan, plus transaction fee. Plans with custom domains start at $12/month.

9. Zyro: Best for entrepreneurs who want full support

Zyro has gotten a lot of praise for how easy it makes the web development process. No matter your skill level—even if you’re starting from zero—Zyro has a clean, minimalist, and user-friendly interface.

You’ll also find robust tools to guide you through the web design and launch process. And if you get stuck or have trouble figuring something out, Zyro’s customer support team is ready to help.

Like other website builders for small business, Zyro comes pre-loaded with tons of templates, free high-quality images, and presets that ensure you have a beautiful website without having to do all of the hard parts yourself. It even has AI-driven branding tools to cut out the guesswork when it comes to creating a truly impactful and high-performing store.

Price: Basic plan starts at $8.90/month.

Summary: 9 best website builders for small business owners

Here’s a recap of the best website builders for small businesses and what they’re best used for:

Shopify: Best overall ecommerce site builder GoDaddy: Best for quick-and-easy websites WordPress: Best for custom web experiences Squarespace: Best for beautiful, responsive design Wix: Best for extending site functionality  Site123: Best for simple websites Weebly: Best for intuitive editing Square Online: Best free website builder Zyro: Best for entrepreneurs who want full support

When deciding which website builder to use, there are a few key considerations: the type of website you want to build, the complexity and customizations you want, how much time and money you can invest, and your current skills and resources.

Once you have an understanding of your needs and capabilities, choosing the right website builder will be a much simpler decision.

All that’s left to do is get out there and bring your business to life!

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That’s why it’s on you to regularly audit your link building strategy, and figure out if you’re really getting the best backlinks for your brand.

In this article, we’ll cover some of the ways that link building has evolved, and some of the best strategies to get quality backlinks in 2019.

The Best Backlinks in 2019: Big-Picture Link Building

Let’s start with a big-picture perspective on link building, including why it’s important and how it’s developed in recent years.

Backlinks are just hyperlinks on the internet that point to your domain (and the various pages within that domain). They’re important because they’re considered as a marker of trustworthiness in PageRank, the algorithm at the heart of Google Search. Basically, Google wants to rank its most trustworthy results above its less-trustworthy results, assuming relevance is equal. It uses the number and quality of inbound links to determine how trustworthy a site is; in other words, if you get quality backlinks from many different high-authority publishers, your own domain authority will increase. The higher your domain and page-level authority, the higher you’re going to rank in searches.

In an ideal world, links would naturally be distributed according to which content is best—but this rarely happens unprovoked. Link building is a strategy meant to help companies generate inbound links intentionally, earning domain authority as well as direct traffic.

Google hasn’t tinkered with the link-relevant side of its algorithm much in previous years. The last major addition to Penguin (Google’s link-centric algorithm) occurred in October of 2016. Throughout 2018 and 2019 (so far), there have been a few important updates, including carousel changes, mobile layout changes, unconfirmed rollouts resulting in ranking fluctuations, and a core update in March of 2019. None of these updates have had a substantial impact on how links are evaluated in Google Search, but it’s still important to review and audit your link building practices in 2019 to ensure they’re up-to-date—and getting you the best backlinks possible.

How to Get Quality Backlinks

It’s not effective to build links indiscriminately. In fact, Google actively cautions webmasters against these activities. Built into Google’s search algorithm (via Penguin) is a system that gauges the relevance, value, and “natural” qualities of each link on the internet. If it seems unnatural, out of place, or intentionally built to boost your authority, it may not pass authority to your domain. In some cases, it may actively hurt your authority score with a Google penalty.

So how can you get quality backlinks?

We’ll go over individual strategies to get the best backlinks for your brand in the next section, but it’s best to start with a high-level overview. Google wants to see links that are contextually relevant, valuable for readers, diverse in nature, and featured on the best-quality publishers available. The best way to achieve these criteria while still controlling your campaign enough to guarantee placement is through active offsite guest posting.

You’ll start by creating linkable assets on your site (i.e., high-quality onsite articles with strong facts, statistics, and/or quotes). Then, you’ll develop offsite articles, fine-tuned for specific publishers that are ideally both relevant to your brand and authoritative overall. These articles will each feature a link back to an article or resources on your home domain. Over time, as you grow your network of publishers and work your way up the ladder of offsite authority, your authority and rankings will grow.

Get Links in 2019: Top Strategies for Expert Link Building

With that core architecture in mind, these are the best link building strategies to help you develop your campaign in 2019:

Get quality backlinks with a link building agency. Building quality backlinks on your own is challenging for many reasons. You’ll be in charge of selecting links, developing content, and establishing new relationships with a wide range of different publishers. But if you work with a link building agency, you’ll be able to tap into their already-experienced network of content writers, and their already-established network of publisher relationships. There are many types of link building agencies out there, some of which may try to offer link schemes or low-quality services, so it’s important to verify you’re working with an agency that’s reputable and committed to getting quality backlinks for your brand. That said, if you can find a valuable partner, your link building agency should be able to build better backlinks and build them more reliably, consistently, and cost-efficiently than you can on your own. Focus on topics more than keywords. Keywords are a divisive topic in the link building community because while they do serve an important purpose, they also need to be considered in context. In the old days of SEO, you could optimize both your offsite content title and the anchor text of your link to include specific keywords and phrases identical to the ones you want to rank for. These days, thanks to the semantic capabilities of the Hummingbird update and Google’s zero-tolerance policy for keyword stuffing, things are more complex. It’s certainly fine to optimize for specific keywords in your link building strategy, so long as they remain contextually relevant and “natural” in the article, but it’s usually better to focus on high-level topics. That way, you’ll naturally optimize for a wide range of phrases synonymous with your target phrase. Remember the best backlinks point to quality content. Strong backlinks should point to strong content. If the link leads to a well-written, well-researched piece of content on your website, it will be less likely to be removed by publishers and more likely to be valued by readers. Accordingly, your link building strategy should always start with onsite content. This is counterintuitive to many link building newcomers, who want to jump into the offsite content game as soon as possible. But if you want the best backlinks in 2019, you need to have these valuable anchor points. Get links from big publishers. It’s true that both the quantity and quality of links pointing to your site will play into your site’s perceived trustworthiness, but they aren’t on equal footing. A single link from a high-profile, authoritative publisher is going to be much more valuable than several links from mid-tier or low-tier publishers. You’ll need to rebalance your link building strategy in 2019 according to this rule. Obviously, you won’t be able to get to high-tier publishers right away (especially if you don’t have much existing brand credibility), but you should be able to optimize your strategy in a way that helps you climb that authoritative ladder. In other words, strive to get featured in bigger, better publishers, expanding vertically, rather than spending your effort expanding horizontally. Get links from lots of publishers. Building additional links on a single domain will yield diminishing returns. When you get that first quality backlink, you’ll receive a ton of authority for your domain (and the page you’re pointing to). When you build the second, you’ll receive a small boost, but not a very noticeable one. Subsequent links will continue to decline in authority passed. Accordingly, one of the best ways to expand your link building strategy is to try and build links on as many new publishers as possible. Maintaining relationships with your previous publishers can be valuable, especially if you’re interested in the secondary benefits of link building, but the best backlinks will always be those built on a publisher for the first time. Don’t skimp on link placement standards. When you’re building lots of backlinks, it’s easy to get lazy and start churning out half-hearted content. But every link you build deserves your full attention and your highest standards—even on lower-tier publishers. Scrutinize each new link to ensure it makes sense in the body of the article, is placed in a way that’s valuable to readers, and is surrounded by similar links to other authorities. This will help you maximize the long-term health of your links and improve your reputation with publishers of all levels. Mix up dofollow and nofollow links. In case you aren’t familiar, “dofollow” links are standard hyperlinks, followed by Google’s web crawlers and valued as passers of authority. Nofollow links are marked with a special tag that prevents web crawlers from considering them. Nofollow links are often used by publishers as a way to preserve their reputation or ensure their writers aren’t creating content meant to manipulate search engines. While dofollow links are inherently more valuable in some ways, that doesn’t mean you should neglect nofollow links. Nofollow links can still pass traffic to your site (just not authority), and can be valuable ways to increase your brand exposure and build relationships with more publishers. Choose dofollow when you have a choice, but don’t pass up a valuable nofollow opportunity. Avoid link schemes at all costs. There is no justification for using a link scheme. Intentionally placing links in a way that violates Google’s terms of service is inevitably going to result in a penalty, or at the very least, a marred reputation. Many cheap link building services masquerade as legitimate link building practices, but don’t be fooled; if content isn’t a core part of their campaign to get quality backlinks, you should immediately be suspicious. Link schemes may seem like a quick way to get a cheap boost, but they’re always going to harm you in the end. Mimic your competitors’ link building strategies. If you’re stuck on where to build links, consider looking at the backlink profiles of your competitors. Chances are, there are dozens, if not hundreds of companies much like yours also trying to get quality backlinks as efficiently as possible. If you study where they’re building links, you’ll get a powerful hint for the publishers you should go after next—or at least inspiration on how to think about the future possibilities. It’s not a good idea to copy your competitors’ strategies directly; you’ll find it hard to outpace them, and besides, you probably have subtly different goals. However, it’s worth taking a look to learn more about your competitive environment. There are many backlink profile tools you can use to perform this evaluation, including Ahrefs’s Backlink Checker and Moz’s Link Explorer. Evaluate your best backlinks (and repeat the process that got them). While you have your backlink checker of choice pulled up, take a look at the backlinks you’ve built for your own domain. You can also check out how much referral traffic they’re generating by consulting Google Analytics. If you’re building links on multiple publishers, it will soon be obvious which posts were definitely worth the effort and which ones fell short of a favorable return. This information should be dictating where you choose to build links next; are there publishers that serve the same niche as your most valuable ones? Are there editors or webmasters of valuable domains who have access to other prominent domains? Is there a particular content topic or linking strategy that seems to be generating disproportionately high interest? Optimizing Your Link Building Strategy

If you’re interested in getting the best backlinks, you’re probably feeling overwhelmed. In addition to understanding the nuances and complexities of link building and search engine optimization (SEO), to get quality backlinks, you’ll need to go through the effort of producing, editing, publishing, and distributing content.

That’s why it’s in your best interest to work with a link building agency, which can get quality backlinks for your site much more efficiently—and in many cases, for less time and money than you’d spend on your own. If you’re interested in learning more about our link building strategies, or if you’re ready to get quality backlinks for your site, contact us at SEO.co today for a free consultation!

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