Small Business Website Design
Did You Know That The Majority Of Local Businesses Obtain Nearly 60% Of Their Turnover From New Customers?
Unfortunately, the days are long gone when businesses could rely on a local and loyal customer base providing repeat sales week after week.
Fact – Buyers Prefer To Deal Locally
Customers can now sit in the comfort of their own homes, drink in hand, trawling the internet.
And that’s precisely where the small business needs to be – where the fish are feeding – on the internet (love it or hate it!)!
Ten years ago, a local company could easily get by without a website. Back then, the Internet was new, and not every family had a computer hooked up to the worldwide web. And, for many of those people who were online, the Internet was a sort of mysterious place – a new world that was worth a little time poking around in and exploring.
But somewhere along the way, three things happened –
1. High Speed Internet Access got cheaper, and replaced dial up for the majority of users.
2. Around 90% of all homes in the UK and USA are now connected to the Internet.
3. Google became THE dominant search engine
What does a High Speed Internet connection have to do with anything? A lot. Ten years ago, most people had dial up connections over a standard phone line. That meant that most of the time they weren’t hooked up to the Internet, and connecting usually took several minutes – that’s if you were lucky enough to get a connection at all. And surfing was slow.
In other words, if people needed to look up the phone number of a local company, back then it was much easier and faster to just grab the Yellow Pages. Besides, back then, few local companies had their own website.
But these days, in most homes, there are several computers hooked up to the Internet 24/7, with a high speed DSL connection. Millions of people spend several hours a day in front of their computer, surfing the Internet. And the users come from right across the generations – from the kids to the retired folk who want to research and check out what they’re interested in purchasing.
So what does Google have to do with anything? Well, in a word, everything. Ten years ago, there were lots of search engines – Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Netscape, AOL, and scores of others. And there still are dozens of search engines. But hardly anyone uses them.
Google came along around ten years ago, and they just completely took over the search engine business, practically overnight, because they were so much better than the others. Probably 85-90 percent of all searches these days are Google searches. And Google lists everything, including local businesses.
Fact – Buyers Prefer To Deal Locally
Are you starting to see the big picture? Ten years ago, most people still weren’t on the Internet, and now they are. And today, instead of being an expensive, slow moving toy, the Internet has become an integral part of their lives. Now, with a click of their mouse and a few keystrokes, they can find any information they need in about 5 seconds.
Why get up, hunt down the Yellow Pages, dig through its hundreds of pages until they find “WiFi Games Shop’, when they can just type in “their town + WiFi Games Shop’ and have all the information they need without leaving their chair?
Which means that the Yellow Pages are yesterday’s news, and if you don’t have a website for your business online, you are missing out on huge numbers of leads and customers.
Any local business that doesn’t have a website has got two choices – get a website, and get one soon, or plan to eventually go out of business. It’s just that simple.
But, you have to be careful about what website you put up – there are some golden rules here - SEE PART TWO OF THIS REPORT Why Most Business Websites Are A Waste Of Time And Money”.
