Hey everyone,
Right here, I just want to do a post I’ve written about this topic on several occasions over the past few years. About why every business needs a website even if you aren’t relying on online business. If you’re a brick-and-mortar local business. Sometimes those businesses don’t think that they need one and in reality, there’s really no downside to having one and the upside is that you can increase your business. Sometimes even double it or more so let’s just get right into it.
(1) GET ONLINE
The first one is the obvious one you want to get online, I mean you’re not going to get a slice of the online business pie. If you’re not online and nowadays there are several ways to get online. But at the core of your business, you should have a website even if you do have other online properties. The reason for that is, you have full control of your website when it’s on your own domain and you’re hosting it.
(2) FULL CONTROL
If you build your following or build an audience on another platform like Instagram, Facebook, something like that, you have to play by the rules and the rules are always changing. So for instance that you know the best example is Facebook, where people would have thousands of lakes on their page and it was almost like free marketing. Every time they sent out a status update on their page it went out to thousands of people. But then over time, Facebook users started complaining about that and now you only reach maybe five to ten percent of your Facebook you know the people that like your Facebook page. So you have to pay for the right to reach the rest of those customers or potential customers and people as you would imagine got pretty angry at that. But the bottom line is it’s Facebook’s platform it’s their hosting and it’s their rules. So yeah that’s why you want to set up shop on your own domain on your own hosting platform with in my opinion a WordPress website.
(3) BRANDING
So let’s go to the next topic here, it’s branding I mean what I’ve noticed working with a few customers. Actually, local ones the more that you appear in a really small area. You know in a county in a city the more than your business name appears the more that people are gonna recognize you, and the more you’re gonna get searches for your business name or people just hearing about your business through word of mouth and finding you online through other ways. But branding is really important and it’s something that it’s a long-term play. But an easy way to do it is to have a good logo and consistent appearance between all your marketing materials like, if you have brochures, invoices, your website, your social media platforms, you know t-shirts or apparel polo shirts stuff like that business cards. I mean all that comes into play and if you can have every one of those consistent, you’re gonna look a lot more professional than the company next to you.
(4) INFORMATION
Another obvious one well I mean you would think it’s obvious but a lot of people neglect it. If you rely on phone calls or in-store visits you’re not going to be open 24/7. But people sometimes want to research they want to know about your company your products your services on their schedule, not on your schedule. The easiest way to do that is to put as much information as you can about your business online and really tell your company story in a unique way.
(5) ESTABLISH TRUST
The next topic is, here you want to establish trust. This is probably the most important thing with a website. I mean think about it, if somebody is just finding your company online they have no reference of the people behind it what your company’s about, how long you’ve been in business for. So the more information you could put on that you know you could have customer testimonials, reviews, talk about your results, the best projects you’ve done, how your product or service is going to benefit your potential customer’s lives. So the more that you can establish a human connection with people, the more they’re going to be drawn to do business with you.
(6) ORGANIC TRAFFIC
Another important aspect about this is, there are going to be negative reviews out there on your business. I mean the only people who generally leave reviews online are people that are extremely happy or extremely disappointed and most of the time it’s the people that are extremely disappointed. So if you have any negative reviews on third-party sites like Yelp you know Angie’s List other business directories like that some local directory. You can outweigh that by putting customer testimonials you know videos of people talking about your service on your website. I think there have been studies about this that show people’s trust. So that’s just something to consider.
(7) PAID TRAFFIC
Another topic here, we have organic traffic. As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, sometimes you can really increase your business you know double or triple if you have a great online presence. But the reality is that’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to take some time to build that content and that authority up online. But the only way you’re going to do is by starting now and by being consistent with it over a long period of time. So you want to make it a habit to update your website frequently continue to add pictures, blog posts, articles, before after pictures. If you’re a service-oriented business, continue to add content to your site and Google is going to repay you for being diligent with that effort.
Last but not least, you don’t have to wait if you don’t want to. I mean if you want to pay pull out your credit card you can get traffic instantly on dozens of platforms. So if you really think you have a great offer, if you really think you have an opportunity to market that offer, all you need is a website. A one-page website that either tells the story of your product or service or collects lead. So that is really the overall knowledge of why you need a website as a business. You can test offers quickly, you can invest in building your website over time which is going to result in more traffic from Google. You have full control and overall it completely outweighs any negative to setting up a website.
In this post, I talked about some reasons why all business needs a website. If you’re a business owner, don’t hesitate to get online today and if you want a free trial of my consultancy, feel free to message me. Just fill up the form below and send me the message.
