Do small businesses need a website?

As a small business, asking yourself the question, do small businesses need a website? Is likely to be something you do often. The answer to your question is yes but with caveats.

You should not invest significant sums in a website without investing in some search engine optimisation or SEO. SEO is often an element of web design that small businesses neglect. This can lead to disappointment when customers don’t come visiting after a website is launched. SEO is essentially what convinces the search engines to list you and list you under the search terms relevant to your subject.

Another caveat to consider is how I am I going to benefit from an investment in a website? What are you going to get back? Yes you can put your website on your business cards and stationary, but you should want more? So think about how you can integrate your business into your web presence. Perhaps open a dialogue through it with your customers, introducing a forum to discuss their industry related problems. This is a powerful reason that will keep them coming back to you. That way your customers will start to see you as an authority site and so will the search engines. This functionality can be obtained quite cheaply.

You should consider building a social media hub around your website achieving similar results to a forum. The immeadiate place for starting this task are Facebook pages and Twitter pages. This might sound a gimmick? So go now and check out what companies like Vodafone are doing with social media.

The last caveat should be, can I sell it over the web? The answer to that question should always be yes, it’s how and how to do it effectively that is important.

For an in depth discussion as to how we can help you with your small business website, contact us here.