A small business needs a website. Consumers turn to search engines when they want to buy something these days. When they do that, they are looking for a website. You can win them over if you have one that meets their needs and wants.
What You Need to Do to Get Started
All you need to do is decide whether you are going to create the website or have a website designer or developer do it. Most business owners turn to a website designer/developer because they do not have the expertise needed to create a professional looking and functional website. A web professional can help with the preliminary work of getting a site established online and then create one that will impress your current and future customers. The following are what website designers will do for you:
- Help you get a website URL for your business. This is your online address for your business. It’s the http://www.yourbusiness.com that you see for other businesses.
- Find hosting for your website. When you have a URL, you will need a place for your website to live, which is what hosting does for you. Hosting is a monthly charge.
- Build a website with the images and pages you need for each of your products and services. This may include an About and Contact page.
- The website will make sense to the Internet user.
- It will load fast.
- It will make a user’s shopping experience easy and fast.
Many website designers will continue to manage your site after it is set up. Management is needed because parts of the site will have to be updated and changed as advancements online happen. It’s best to keep your site up to date, or it could end up leading to a decrease in search engine ranking. This can hurt you because consumers won’t be able to find you easily.
If you decide to do it yourself, be ready to put in a lot of hours. Since it takes professionals at least a couple of weeks to get a site up and running, it can take some novice website designers months to get their site up in a way that will impress users and work efficiently.
What to Do After the Site Is Up
Once your website is online, you can move on to marketing it to your target audience online. This can be done through a blog, social media, press releases, and link building. A blog should be updated with a new post every day. You will need to establish a social media presence to get the word out about your business and gain the trust of consumers interested in your services and products. Press releases can lead to more exposure in the media, which can then bring more consumers to your website. Link building is having other websites either recommend you to their visitors by posting a link to your site or inviting you to guest blog for them and including a link to your site in the bio.
If this overwhelms you, don’t worry. There is help out there for all of it. Take the help, so you can be successful at bringing more business your way.
