I’ve talked with a lot of small business owners who have decided they don’t want to deal with the hassle of building and maintaining a Web site. In some cases they rely on a social media site like Instagram for their online presence, and in other cases they just don’t want to deal with the hassle, since most of their business is my word of mouth.
Here’s why having your own small business Web site is critical.
1. It gives your business legitimacy
Imagine that you walked into a new dentist’s office. The dentist came highly recommended by a friend, but when you walked into the office you saw old, torn-up carpeting, crumbling walls, and grumpy staff sitting on dilapidated office furniture.
Just as bad, let’s say that your dentist set up his practice in an office in Facebook’s headquarters. Sure, the headquarters is lovely, but your dentist works out of a broom closet on the corner of the 37th floor.
Regardless of how highly recommended the dentist was, chances are you won’t hang around.
It’s the same with your online presence. If you have an outdated Web site or you’re relying on another site for your business’ online presence, it’s hard for customers to take your business seriously.
On the other hand, a professional Web site that’s professionally designed and has detailed, up-to-date information about your business tells the world that you’re a legitimate business.
2. It lets you reach potential new customers
Every business needs customers to survive. Word-of-mouth advertising is and will always be the most effective and most affordable form of advertising.
But SEO is the next best thing. Unlike other forms of advertising,
Despite what the so-called “experts” are telling you, it’s not difficult at all to rank for meaningful phrases on Google organic search, as long as you run your business well, delight your customers, and create the right content on your Web site.
If you’d like to cut to the chase, feel free to skip ahead to my series of articles titled Getting Your Small Business Site to Rank on Google.
3. It lets you stay in contact with your existing customers
When a customer has a question about your business, what’s the first thing they do? They’ll likely pick up the phone and ask you. That’s great, until your business becomes so successful that you can’t pick up every phone call, and you can’t hire enough staff to keep up with all the questions.
A Web site allows you to communicate with your customers. What are the most common questions your customer ask you? Your answers should all be on your Web site. What are your hours? What products or services do you offer? How much do you charge? Why should I choose you when I have so many other choices?
If you don’t have a Web site, someone else is telling your story for you, and not you.
4. It’s 100% yours
When you build your online presence on a site like Facebook or Instagram, who are you really helping? Ultimately you’re helping Meta, the owners of Facebook and Instagram. The more content you provide to their platform, the more they’ll monetize your content by showing ads to the people reading it. None of that money goes to you, of course. Yet another problem with using social media as your main business presence is that the content changes so rapidly that anything you post will be pushed down quickly. On a Web site, what you publish stays there until you decide to take it down.
It’s even worse for small businesses that rely on sites like Yelp and Google for their online presence. They are at the complete mercy of those platforms. If one disgruntled customers leave a one-star review, that can damage your reputation and ruin your business. Worse, when people Google your business name, those sites and those reviews will show up first..
Yes, you do need to maintain, monitor and moderate your presence on those sites (which I’ll talk you through at a later date). But hosting your own Web site where YOU control the narrative is one of your best defenses.
Your own Web site is yours, and will be for all of time. Even if your hosting company for whatever reasons decides to drop you as a customer, you always have the option of taking a backup of your site and switching to another hosting provider, or even hosting your site from your own PC.
Remember that just because you have a Web site it doesn’t mean you don’t need a social media presence or to maintain your local listings (you do). But a Web site comes first.
Conclusion
This is usually the part where I try to convince you to buy my e-book or pay for my pricey consulting services. But as I said in my welcome post, that’s not what this site is for.
My hope is that you’ll be able to follow the instructions in this Web site to build your own Web site that’s 100% professional, ranks in Google, and at a fraction of the cost you’d pay a consultant to do it for you.