7 Reasons Why a Website is Necessary for Your Small Business
There are many reasons why a business needs a professionally rendered dedicated website. Exactly what that will entail will be different for each company. Some businesses are subsets of a larger umbrella and some are solopreneurs.
More exposure means more customers
Let’s think about your business and getting new customers. After all, we all want more business, right? The outreach to get new customers is most likely going to be either through:
A) Walk-in customers if you have a brick-and-mortar business.
B) One-to-one referrals
C) Print advertising
D) Digital (Including referrals in groups or forums, and Google or FB ads)
Let’s look into the last one since most of your business will probably come from some sort of digital outreach. Here are seven reasons for the importance of having a professionally rendered dedicated website for your business.
1. Legitimize Your Business
First and foremost a website legitimizes your business. The type of website you need will depend on the type of business model you have, but you need a website, period.
A Facebook page, an Instagram page, or even a Google My Business free web page is not a company website.
A company website that allows your potential customers to see that you’re a legit business will have various pages that search engines expect to see.
- Home
- About
- Services
- Contact
- Legal / GDPR (this can be several pages)
An established website will also legitimize your business by having an email address that belongs to your domain. For example, this Life Coaching company has an email that ends with “serendipitycircles.com.” The site is owned by Mary Welch, who recognized the need to make sure you have an email that matches your domain name.
2. You’ll Have a 24/7 Salesperson
The beauty of a well-made website is that it will be your salesperson twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. You don’t have to do anything to make it happen, it will happen when you invest in your website.
It’s as if you are handing a visitor a full-color brochure, without even being there. It’s a passive way to attract potential customers and use that interaction time to sell them on your services or goods.
For example, we made a print brochure for Dr. Perkins and then put that same brochure online to reach new customers. This has made it easier to reach out to potential new clients since the website is online and working all day and all night.
3. Educate Potential Clients
Besides being a sales machine while you sleep or vacation, your website is also a training and teaching tool. Some of you may remember Sy Syms’ commercial in the 80s where he says, “An educated consumer is our best customer.” That adage, since picked up by many firms, still rings true. The more you can educate your customer, the more trust you create, and the more people you can help in your business.
For example, let’s look at this hypnosis website and see that she offers free meditations and some great information about healing. Kelly Tallaksen also offered a free book as a lead capture, which educates people on how to heal their inner child. The work she’s put out on her website solidified many potential clients into hiring Kelly because they liked what she had to say, and how she educated them on how to heal.
4. People Can Find You
Google is practically a household word these days, and there’s a reason for that. People heavily rely on Google to find anything and everything they want. This includes many people that are looking for your services. Whether you’re a local vendor or a worldwide business, getting found on the internet is paramount to a business continuing to exist.
When your website is optimized for your business, Google will put your site in front of people searching for your services. We call this Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There’s a great video on this page that explains how SEO works and compares it aptly to a public library.
Remember, it’s Bing, Yahoo, and Google’s business to help people find what they want. They want to serve their clients the most relevant websites for their search words. If a search engine does not understand your site, you will not get found.
5. Show Yourself, Your Work, Your Wares
We did talk about a professionally made website being a 24/7 sales person, yet this is slightly different. Your work, even if it’s a service, is an art. A website can expand outside of the normal sales verbiage and talk about you as a professional, your story, the history of your company, and stories of particular services or wares.
The is your chance to explain in detail everything you would like potential clients to know about the inner workings of your particular company. Your About Me page has the potential to represent your company’s dedication to your craft.
6. Boosts Your Social Media Presence
There’s an interesting two-way street that happens between your website and social media. When clients see your website listed on your company’s social media profile, they jump over to see if you have a solid business model. And when clients see you have social media on your website, they jump over to see if you engage with your customers and if you’re good people.
If one is missing, then the company appears to be a hobby, not a serious business. You don’t need to have all social media, but you do need to have the ones that are relevant to your business. And you absolutely must have a professional, functional, responsive, user-friendly website.
7. Solidifies Your Brand
Back in the day before computers, your brand would look something like a business card, a printed brochure, and maybe some advertising in the local papers. Now your brand is all that, plus a website, social media, and apps. When you have professionally curated graphics, a website, social media, and printed collateral you look your best, and clients will notice the nuances of an amateur brand.
In Conclusion
Depending on your business there are probably more reasons that we can list regarding why you need a website. Unless you don’t want more business, a professional presence is worth its weight in bitcoin.
TL;DR: Just get a professional website as a professional or look like a hobby instead of a business.
