5 Reasons a Company Website Isn’t Optional: It’s a Necessity to Survive and Thrive

While starting a small business can be a very rewarding experience, that doesn’t mean that it’s without challenges. Because there’s no shortage of obstacles that can stand in the way of small business success, it’s important to give yourself every advantage possible. One of those very important advantages is to have a website. Since people spend so much time searching online, not having a website means that you’re missing out on the opportunity to connect with a lot of potential customers.

To understand exactly why having a website is a necessity for any small business that wants to succeed, let’s go over four different specific benefits:

Protect Your Reputation

Good online reviews of your business can really help it flourish. Unfortunately, it only takes one negative review to undermine all the other good things that have been said about you. The good news is if you have a website, you can publish content on it that is specifically designed to help make any online negativity about your business less visible.

Increase Customer Loyalty

When you have a website, it’s easy to add a sign-up form so people can give you their email address. Depending on your specific type of business, you can then send the people who sign up anything from a bi-weekly newsletter to coupons. The key takeaway is regardless of what you decide is best to send, as long as it provides value, it will help to increase customer loyalty.

Attract Highly Targeted Traffic from Google

Although we touched on this in the opening paragraph, it’s such an important topic that it’s worth discussing in detail. When people use Google to search for a specific keyword phrase, they’re basically saying exactly what they need at that time. So if your website appears in the list of results that show up and the searcher clicks your link, there’s a very good chance that they’re going to want to do business with you.

Serves as a Hub for Social Media Promotion

There’s a lot of value in using social media to promote your business. The one caveat is in order to maximize results, you need a central hub where you can drive traffic from all the different social sites you use. By having a website, accomplishing that goal will be quite easy to do.

Your Website Needs to Be Visible in Google

As you can see from several of the benefits above, small businesses will only gain those things if they not only have a website but have a website that shows up in Google. While making your website visible in Google for relevant searches may seem like some kind of magic, the reality is it simply requires an effective marketing strategy. So whether you already have a website but need to increase visibility, or you want to have a website built that is fully search engine optimized, your best option is to work with an experienced design, development and marketing agency.

Local SEO Tips: How To Increase The Local Influence of Your Website

Local SEO Tips

Because more people than ever are now searching for local businesses using both standard and mobile devices, local SEO has become essential for any business that serves a specific geographic region. While it’s something that simply can’t be overlooked, it has actually become more complicated in recent years.

The main reason is that Google wants to ensure that they provide the best experience to searchers who are expecting local results. This goal has caused them to put measures in place that discourage businesses without an actual local presence from gaming the system.

Although executing the right local SEO strategy can be a challenge, the good news is Google does want to display real businesses in its local results. So if you have any kind of retail presence in your area, you should be able to get the visibility you want by following a handful of straightforward steps, as well as knowing certain pitfalls to avoid:

How to Get Started with Local SEO

The first thing you’ll want to do is create a Google Business page. When it comes to filling out this page, the more information you can provide, the better. That includes adding plenty of pictures to your page so people can see what your business looks like and exactly what it has to offer.

Once you have a Google Business page, you can begin focusing on other tactics to augment your efforts. One of those tactics is to ensure all mentions of your business name, address and phone number (NAP) are up to date. Having plenty of these up-to-date citations from credible sources sends a strong message to Google that your business does indeed have an actual local presence.

Finally, identify ways to keep the momentum going. Whether that’s including a link to your Google Business page at the bottom of emails, or creating a strategy for how many times a week you want to share content through your page, keeping your efforts active will help drive the best results.

What To Avoid

Once you get your local business SEO on the right track, the last thing you want to do is make a mistake that’s going to derail your progress. The two biggest things you want to avoid are creating any type of fake reviews or doing anything online that could tarnish your reputation. In terms of fake reviews, Google is quite good at identifying patterns that seem unnatural, so avoid the temptation to write reviews of yourself or pay others to leave positive remarks.

And when it comes to protecting your reputation, even if you receive a negative review, don’t respond in anger. There are countless examples of businesses making things way worse for themselves by getting mad at negative reviews instead of finding a better way to deal with them or simply ignoring the review.

By putting the steps we covered to work, as well as keeping in mind the things that you should avoid, you’ll be able to develop a local SEO presence in Google’s results that will help generate phone calls and visits from highly targeted potential customers.