If your business has no web presence at all, then the answer is most definitely no! The majority of your potential clients looking for the products and services you offer now use the Internet to find the businesses that can supply them.
According to Logic Media Zone there are now about 17.5 billion searches per month, with the top 3 search engines being:
- Google: 64%
- Bing: 20%
- Yahoo!: 12%
And that doesn’t even cover Social Media!
What Does This Mean For My Business?
If your business is not online, or not online successfully, then it’s missing out on those searches. What I mean by not online successfully, is if your business has a bad website, or a website that ranks so low in searches that no-one can find it.
Nowadays, most people looking for a service or store, start with their favorite search engine and search for it online. If your business has no website, then it has no chance of being found by anyone. Even if you do have a website, you still need to take action to make sure you outrank your competitors in those searches, otherwise you still won’t get found.
The bottom line is, if your business is not online, and is not in the top 10 search results, you’re losing out on sales, that’s money out of YOUR cash register and into your COMPETITOR’S cash register.
What Do I Need to Do?
If your business is not online and is missing out on the lion’s share of its sales as a result, there is something you can do about it. Follow the following steps to get your website online and find-able by your customers:
- Build a Website: This is your critical first step, everything else depends on this. There are a lot of tools for you to build your own website if you choose to, tools like WordPress, Wix, Weebly, and so on. These can help, but only if you’re willing to invest the time and effort into learning how to build an effective website and then do it. This is time spent not doing your business’ primary activities. Even with these tools, your best bet is to hire an expert, which doesn’t have to cost as much as you’d expect, the experts can use the same website building tools as you can, and do it fast and effectively. Experts also know how to build your site so visitors know exactly what it’s about, and what action you want your visitors to take and give a clear, easy way for them to take that action.
- Get Your Website Ranking In the Top 10 On Search Engines: This process is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It involves using a very specific set of techniques to make your site more relevant to the major search engines for specific searches, so your site ranks higher in the list of results. Where you need to be here to benefit from searches is in the top 10, which puts you on page 1, which is where you are the most likely to get those people onto your website.
- Get On Social Media: The amount of users on social media is staggering. As are the opportunities to get them to share your business, website and products with their friends and followers. This also allows you to cast a wider net across the Internet and give your customers more ways to find you.
- Build Up an Email List: This is also crucial. Once you have subscribers to your email list, this is virtually free advertising. You can promote your products to your email list and it costs almost nothing. This also allows you to get more effective use out of your advertising spent online as well. You send anyone who clicks on your ad to a special page that has the sole purpose of collecting the contact info of all visitors to the page. This page has only 2 options, fill out and submit the form, or leave the page. Even businesses who do have an effective website, and who are ranking well in searches, and do have a strong social media presence, often still miss this critical step to the online success of their business. Don’t let that happen to you, start building up this list, even while you are building the first 3 steps I mentioned above. Building your email list is a huge topic, so I’ll save the details on how to do this for future blog posts. If you want to make sure you get that important info, make sure you hit that subscribe button located both at the top and bottom of this article to join my email list and you will get an email notice when I post my next article, and will see first hand why this is so important for your business success.
As always, if you have any specific questions about anything in this article, feel free to post them in the comments section below. Also, if you are actively building out your own email list, please post what tools and techniques you use in the comments below.
