Are you still waiting to create a business website? Do you wonder why in the world people give websites so much attention when business happens in the real world and not online?
Well, we’re going to break the importance of a website down for you. It’s an excellent business tool that feeds business from the web into your door, even if your business doesn’t do any eCommerce or web-based sales.
Hopefully, the ideas below will show you how valuable websites are and give you a few tips on web development that could help you out down the line. Let’s take a look.
Customers Start Their Journey Online
Whichever way you swing it, most of the business that takes place starts online. Aside from word of mouth and print media, most people think of something they want or need, make a web search for that product or service, and click one of the first few results.
In a lot of cases, your business website is the first impression that a customer gets of your brand. When that website is lacking or seems unworthy, people can easily move on to the next site and try their luck.
A lot of customer traffic goes to businesses this way. If you’re not even online, though, you can’t get into the running. The best you could do is catch the eye of customers as they drive past your store to the place they found online.
While there are a lot of niches that operate through word of mouth, things are trending more and more digital every day. There seems to be no sign that the trend will change, so odds are that you’ll need a website very soon if you want to keep up with the competition.
A Website is A Marketing Tool
Digital presence spreads brand awareness. By delivering engaging content at the right time and place, companies can reach a wider audience. Public relations professionals can obtain high-quality media coverage in a few ways, including links built by clients and mentions from clients in the media. You can visit Violet PR to find out how to develop marketing and communication strategies for your clients. Even if people aren’t looking for your product or service, the more often they see your name come up, the more likely you are to get their business down the line.
Your site isn’t just a place that people have to search for or visit directly. In other words, you can show up to searches and buyer’s journeys that don’t directly pertain to you.
How do you do that? That presence is a byproduct of search engine optimization (SEO).
Search engine optimization is the process of creating your website to agree with the search engine algorithm. Google’s algorithm works off of something like 200 ranking factors to determine which sites are most relevant.
The better you do with different pages, the more overall value your website has. This is called “domain authority.” As you post content and start ranking better, you can spread that content out into different niches that exist parallel to your own.
Over time, your site will generate a great deal of traffic and put you front and center when users think of products like the ones you sell.
Other Digital Marketing Benefits
The internet provides almost endless opportunities for you to market your business. The thing is, you need a website for users to land on when they click your advertisements.
You could utilize a social media page, but that only gets you so far. With a website, you can market on social media platforms, search engines, and more. Good SEO provides you with a lot of visibility that works even better than paid ads.
You need a website to do all of these things. Without those options, you’re limiting your business’ success a great deal.
You might be curious about how to go about creating a website or starting to market it, though. Let’s examine the fundamentals of how that works.
How to Start Your Business Website
You don’t need to understand coding or have any particular skills to start your site. Just find the best website builder you can, follow the instructions that it gives, and you’ll have a website on your hands.
You might need to pay a small fee to get the ball rolling. In a lot of cases, though, the website is free or cheaper than 20 dollars to create.
Whether or not that website does well is another story, though. The existence of a site is great for referrals, links from your social media site, and generating reviews from existing customers. The people who know and trust you will engage with the site just fine.
That said, a site that attracts new individuals requires some effort. It’s important to curate the site in a way that reflects your brand. Websites with very little effort and poor user experience tend to get stuffed toward the bottom of the search results.
People don’t trust these sites as much, and a lack of SEO leaves them struggling to rank in the top pages.
Building Your Search Rankings
To start inching your way forward, try to work with the tools that Google gives you. Verify your Google MyBusiness page so that you can start showing up in Google Maps and generate business reviews.
Then take a look at Google Search Console. This tool allows you to see how Google views your site when it gets crawled and indexed. Crawling is just the term used to describe how Google AI analyzes and ranks your website.
You’ll find errors, suggestions for site layout, and a lot more. These are the insights that you’d rarely get yourself. Finally, take a look at Google Analytics.
Analytics show you how many people visit your site, which pages are the most successful, and bottlenecks where users might get turned off or discouraged. All of these metrics give you insight into ways that you can improve your user experience, grow in search results, and generate more traffic.
Want to Learn More About This Business Tool?
Using a website as a business tool is essential in this day and age. We get that it’s a little confusing to navigate at first, though. All you need is a little information on how things work.
We’re here to help. Explore our site for more ideas on digital marketing, SEO, web strategy, and more.