Why Your Business Needs a Website!

There are so many business benefits to having a good quality website. Here are our top few reasons why your business must have a website!

Visibility on search engines

When looking for a product or service most people’s initial instinct is to search via a search engine such as google or bing. Now there are 2 key points that are important to make here:

• If you’ve been using social media to grow your brand awareness, those in need of your services might skip the search engine part and enquire with you immediately instead. This happens because your brand is their first thought as they’ve regularly seen you online. 

• The second key thing here is whether you’ve been using social media to build brand awareness or not, your website is still important. Chances are even in the above situation, the customer might google your brand name to find your contact details. Without a website, they may struggle to find these. If you haven’t been using social media, or the person searching for you hasn’t seen you online before, you’ll be 100% reliant on your website showing for their google search to catch that potential customer.

Google doesn't share its research volume data. However, based on internet live stats, it's estimated that it handles 70,000 search queries on average per second. This averages to 5.8 billion searches per day and nearly 2 trillion searches each year. Even if only a tiny fraction of these are applicable to your business, that’s a mountain of opportunities your website has to be in front of potential customers. You could be missing out hugely by neglecting your website. 

Local businesses websites are more important than you might believe 

Some local businesses think having a website isn’t important because they have already established a strong reputation in the local market. We can see completely why you might think this, however, your competition will have a website and will be on Google. As new people move into your area or as new customers who hadn’t needed your services before start to search for your business online you want to be there with your competition. If you’re not, you’re handing all of your potential customers over to your competition. 

Establish a reputation online 

Establishing a reputation online is hard and having a website plays a big role in your reputation and trustworthiness (especially to new customers who haven’t come across you before). Having a website reinstates the fact that you are a legitimate business with legitimate contact details and are a reputable company. 

Google analytics

Having a website allows you to have access to and use Google Analytics - a free tool from google that collects data on the people who visit your site. Google analytics collects basic demographic data such as gender and location but can also tell you in-depth details about your website such as where visitors are dropping off/leaving the site and which traffic channels your leads or sales have come from. This information is imperative as you don’t want to be spending hours and hours a month promoting your site and building connections on LinkedIn for example, only to find out you’ve not had a single lead or sale from this traffic source in 6 months. 

A website provides somewhere to post blogs and news from your business

Sharing news and blog posts via your website is a great way to keep in touch with your customers while also assisting with your SEO and visibility in the search engine results. These blogs and news posts also provide content for your social media. They are great to share on your social platforms and Google My Business as posts and you can reuse the content! Share the post every couple of months to keep generating traffic to it. You can also (and should also) regularly update your blog content as well as producing new content. This helps to keep your website up to date and again, also assists with your SEO. 

Somewhere to direct social media traffic

We’re sure you’re smashing your social media content ;) but without a website where exactly are you directing your traffic? You’re only providing people with one option - to contact you via social media. 

The thing to note about social media is that you’re not targeting people who are actively searching for your product or service. Instead you’re sticking your brand in front of them regularly enough to know to make contact with you when they do require your offerings. These people may also know of others who require your services. For example, I might see a post about physiotherapy and think “hmm mum was looking for someone who could help with that”. Now my mother doesn’t have or even know how to use social media so instead I’d usually send her the company name and she’d look them up on Google. This isn’t the only example of a time someone might want to look you up online but it’s a great example and one that happens regularly. Rarely do we send businesses social media pages to our friends or family but we may well mention their brand name for the other person to look up online. 

Take orders, bookings and get leads

You can use your website to take orders, bookings and receive leads via contact forms - these are all important for business growth. No matter what your niche or industry always make sure you have a contact page where customers can send you a message via a contact form and include your phone number and address where appropriate. This gives your customers a way of contacting you outside of social media or other platforms such as WhatsApp. 

Conclusion 

Hopefully you can see now why having a website is important! It’s also important to keep it up to date and provide new information as and when necessary. 

If you need any help with your website, please don’t hesitate to contact us today. 

Sharing news and blog posts via your website is a great way to keep in touch with your customers while also assisting with your SEO and visibility in the search engine results. These blogs and news posts also provide content for your social media. They are great to share on your social platforms and Google My Business as posts and you can reuse the content! Share the post every couple of months to keep generating traffic to it. You can also (and should also) regularly update your blog content as well as producing new content. This helps to keep your website up to date and again, also assists with your SEO.