We often come across small business owners who don’t have a website for their business. The usual excuse? “Why should I pay for a website when I have a perfectly good FB page for my business?”. This is a limiting & troubled train of thought.
1. Believe it or not, a lot of people are not on Facebook
Take myself as an example. Years ago I decided to delete all of my social media accounts as I wanted to spend less time on a computer and more time focusing on my goals. This does not apply to my business life as I still maintain FB, Instagram & other outlets for businesses that I am apart of, but I’m a perfect example of someone who doesn’t use FB in my personal life. The same goes for many of your potential, and existing clients. We may be in the era of social media but using it as your sole means of reaching customers is going to limit you more than you may think.
2. You won’t be taken as seriously as your competition
One of the biggest red flags when we receive a Handlr partner application here in the office is if the business applying does not have a working website. Whether we like it or not, this is true for the majority of customers. It’s more prevalent in some markets than in others, but it’s almost always there. A real web presence in the form of a full threaded website or even just a simple landing page will provide confidence in a customer or business partner that’s considering your business.
3. SEO
How do you find the answer to anything these days? What about looking up that business that you saw an advertisement for? Or that dog walker you saw wearing a company T-shirt? Google. Yes the wonderful, magical world of Google. The answer to any question we desire is at the end of a search button. It’s one of the most amazing things about the age we live in. So just how does this magic work? Well, anyone who has attempted to dabble in SEO will tell you that search results are dependent on an ever-changing, extremely complicated algorithm set by Google. It can be immensely difficult to climb the ranks of a search, and can easily cost you a lot of money. A sure fire way to climb the ranks? A website. While your Facebook page may show up in some search results, a website simply works much, much better. Add in a few meta tags and you just might be surprised at how high Google ranks you.
4. But I don’t have the skills!
One of the biggest reasons many small businesses don’t have a website is the challenge of getting started. Many of you think you need to hire a specialist charging $200 an hour to build you a custom HTML website. Simply not the case. Websites like Squarespace allow you to use beautiful templates to quickly and easily create the website of your dreams at very low costs. Their simple tools can be used by anyone to create a website in just a few hours.
Ready to get started?
We highly recommend https://www.squarespace.com/. If you need help getting started, let us know! We are happy to guide you through the process and even create web pages for you!