Small business owners need an online presence to survive these days, but regulating a website becomes difficult when you don’t know a lick of HTML. Targeting this demographic, Intuit has announced the latest upgrade to its Intuit Websites platform, providing tools that make it drop-dead simple to create websites and boost online visibility.
At its core, the new version of Intuit Websites is about simplicity for less technically savvy business owners. The offering is very similar to SquareSpace: Rather than write code, users drag and drop content directly onto a finished-looking page. And like SquareSpace, you can build from scratch or choose from a gallery of templates, and all of the editing and publishing is done online. As long as you have a browser and an Internet connection, you’re in business.
Intuit Websites also provides a set of widgets vital to establishing rapport online. Besides connecting to social media and the ability to import reviews of your business from sites like CitySearch, Intuit Websites boasts a new add-on called Traffic Booster.
“Everyone wants to get on page one of Google,” says Ralph Matlack, group project manager at Intuit. “There’s nobody that can guarantee that, but we invented a very simple way to help with that a lot. It’s about being able to put well-structured, search engine-friendly data or content on your site. Our technology will dynamically pull out keywords optimized for getting you found.”
SEO takes time to actually pay off, so Intuit spent time to prove the efficacy of the product. After about nine months of testing, Intuit found that the Traffic Booster increased traffic to websites by roughly 60 percent.
Intuit also accommodates those owners that want to incorporate an online store into their website. With the Intuit Web Payment add-on, merchants and small business owners can accept debit or credit cards directly through the site.
“It gives a site’s visitor the ability to do a transaction without you being involved,” Matlack says.
Monthly subscriptions for Intuit Websites start at $4.99 a month, and each of these add-ons has a monthly fee attached so you only pay for what you use.
Intuit, which is known for its Quickbooks, Quicken, and Turbo Tax accounting programs, currently serves over 320,000 small businesses and customers.
