Why Small Businesses Need a Website

It doesn't matter what market you're in or what audience you serve, a website is necessary to succeed. It helps achieve so many things and will make your business goals a reality much sooner than if you didn't have a website. 51% of small businesses use a website as their main marketing tool, do you? Here are some reason why small businesses need a website in 2018 and beyond.

It helps generate leads

Finding new customers is the toughest task for 66% of small businesses.

Having a website allows you to passively get new customers, as it acts as a way to advertise your products/services. Ensure that you use tools like Google's keyword planner to find relevant keywords to optimize your SEO. Place these in the title tags and meta descriptions of your website. They should be related to your city and services to maximize the effectiveness. For example, you could do "Niagara Falls web design". Posting regular content will also help boost rankings, traffic, and ultimately get your small business more leads. Include a contact form and a lead magnet like an e-book to make your lead gen even stronger.

A boost in trust

Put yourself in the shoes of your customer. They'd like to get your service, but they can't find your website or any detailed information about you. You only have some contact information around and social media accounts. That's fine, but if you really want to be credible and build trust with users, you need a website. A professional looking site makes your brand look better and shows that you invest into your company. By increasing loyalty and retention, you're also going to earn more revenue.

It opens the door to more opportunities

A website is so much more than just a way to reach new customers and build trust, though. When you own a website, you can sell more products like courses and e-books for example. This means that you create extra income streams and easily pivot into new markets. Otherwise, this would be more difficult to pull off and you'd need to invest into different services. A website paired with something like Google Analytics also means that you can collect data to discover new target audiences, popular products, and similar things.