Do I need a website?
Well, the good thing is that you are at least thinking of a website in reference to your business! In my experience there are very few companies or self employed people who can get away with not having a website. If you are asking the question ‘Do I Need A Website’, then my answer is do you like turning money away because that’s what you may as well be doing with not having a website for your business.
Cost Affective!
I have always said that having a website is the most cost affective, value for money marketing platform you can have. After the initial cost of building the website and a small on going cost the customers gained from it cost you very little indeed.
Important parts of website ownership.
A few important things to add to your tick list after building a website are – ‘Google Maps’, Google maps are now blended with the organic search results so you often find the top 3 map listings on the first page of Google just under the PPC ads and just above the organic search results. The result are called ‘local business listings’ and you have to register your business address with Google to have a chance of it showing on the first page or any other map page. This is very important because the first thing a potential customer will do is check to see if the company is local and more often will contact the business nearest to them so make sure you register your local business listing now! Google plus is also important to link to your new site and you can also link your local business map listing to it. Now we come to SEO or search engine optimisation. It’s a common theme we find that business owners of a new website think the website will automatically be found on the first page of the search engines after being built. I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that and gone are the days when it was easy to come top of the search results for your chosen keywords by just adding a few backlinks to your site. On-going SEO is a very slow and laborious job. Not only that but it’s a very skilled job and unless the keywords you want to rank for are very uncompetitive it’s best left to the experts. In fact, even a lot of SEO companies are moving over to adwords or PPC marketing instead because organic SEO is so much harder than it used to be and just not time or money efficient anymore.
Social Media
Don’t forget that a good website designer will also build you a Twitter and Facebook page to go with your new website so you in affect you now have 3 new platforms to attract new customers! Social media can be more important than you think! I know of quite a few business owners who receive more work through Facebook than they do from their website! This is not always the case but the worse case scenario is that your website goes up in the rankings on the search engines because of the growing interaction, likes and follows on your social media accounts.
Rocket Website Design 