You may think you don’t need a small business website, but you do. Having to dig to find out more information about your business, and the products or services you offer can be extremely frustrating for potential customers. No one has time for that.
Having a Small Business Website is Absolutely Essential (No matter what you may assume)
Whether searching your business name specifically, or your business comes up in a general search when they click on that Google result, potential customers are looking for information.
When they can’t find it, or only find a Facebook page which tells them absolutely nothing, they move on to the next prospect. Even if you have good ratings.
The fact is, just seeing a rating doesn’t mean much these days. Ratings can be manipulated, paid for, or otherwise faked, essentially. Have you ever bought a product off of Facebook because of good ratings? Did that product live up to your expectations? What about using Yelp or Google reviews to find out about a new restaurant or business? How often has your experience been different than those leaving those five star reviews?
A Social Media Page Just Isn’t Enough
Consumers, aka, your potential customers, want to know more. They want to see for themselves. They want to be able to view your prices and services and possibly compare them to others BEFORE they decide if they want to give you their hard-earned money. Potential customers may even want to know more about your values and mission. These things can be found on an About page. And About pages are found on websites!
If you don’t have a website and you’re relying on Facebook or Google listings and your ratings alone, you’re missing potential customers. Yes, even small businesses need a website! And there’s no excuse to not have a website these days because the readily available DIY website building platforms are easy enough for anyone to use. You can build your own website within a few hours, actually. If you feel it’s beyond your capabilities, you can always get an expert involved.
How Easy it is
You can even hire a professional website building team, a freelancer, or just someone with a bit of tech savvy and some time on their hands. But mostly, you can do it yourself. Simply search for “website templates” and you’ll have options right at your fingertips. There are a multitude of DIY templates for small business websites out there with slick and attractive options. Choose one!
What You Don’t Have Though
The complicated part, and the part that helps people find your website even if they don’t know you exist, is the SEO. Most options for DIY website builders now have SEO capabilities. Small businesses need a website that includes SEO in order to be discovered.
A quick explainer on SEO for the uninitiated:
SEO stands for search engine optimization. There are many things that optimize your website so that web crawlers can find and index your website and its content. This means when someone searches your keywords, your services, or your business area, your website can be found. SEO is built into everything from the words and images on your website and your blogs, to your backend metadata(the behind the scenes stuff) and everything else you do on the web.
It’s worth the moderate expense to upgrade to the premium versions of these DIY small business website builders to include these features, by the way.
WordPress, for example, is less than $20 a month. Because without good content, and an SEO strategy, your website will likely not be found organically. Meaning, you pay for ads to get discovered and drive customers to your website and then, ideally, to your business.
Small Businesses Need a Website with Content That Looks Professional
So, it’s not enough that you have a small business website, though it’s still better than no website. Even if you don’t decide to optimize your website so search engines can find you, you need to have content that looks professional, is user friendly, free of spelling and grammatical errors, and full of relevant, well laid out content.
This means the text in your small business website is succinct, informative and compelling. There’s only so much space to tell your website visitors what they need to know, so you need to choose wisely.
Every small business website needs at minimum:
Products/Services page or list
Your Contact information
Your Small Business Website Should Also Include a Blog
These pages need to have the right amount of well-written text, include the keywords users search for, and in metadata on the backend. Blogs should also be a part of your SEO strategy for your small business website. Why?
The more often relevant content is added to your website, the more web crawlers see your website as important. Blogs are a way to add this content on a regular basis. Blogs also help build your brand image and story. They can reflect your values, inform your customers and turn them into loyal fans.
Blogs are still relevant!
Blogs for your small business website aren’t the same as personal blogs of days past. These types of SEO-focused blogs still serve a purpose and are still considered essential to building an online footprint for your small business.
Does this seem like too much work? Well, that’s why professional copy and content writers like me exist. We help optimize your small business website with our expertise.
Do you want to build a solid online presence to make your business discoverable to new customers? Start with a small business website! Then reach out and see what I can do to leverage that website to help you outshine the competition and increase your revenue.