How do I know if I need a website for my business?
That seems to be a very popular question when it comes to asking your self should I have a website? And how can it benefit me?
Normally I ask the individual few simple questions which makes it clear for them if a website is suitable for his or her business. When deciding to get a business website setup small business owners have the perception of that it will cost them an arm and a leg. This is not having evaluated what they need and why.
What I will try and assist you is to see what you really need to start with and why? So first here is a few questions to help us both understand your business and if its a good idea to have a website.
1.Do you sell products and services that is needed by a wider community?
2.Do you have a unique set of products and services?
3.Can your products and services be purchased currently online?
4.Do you advertise in local peppers, local media, flyers and pamphlet?
5.Why do I use such forms of advertising?
6.How much is print media is costing your business?
The above question will show you your understanding of the products and services you have on offer. For example normally for a corner store who sell milk fresh bread and few other simple house hold goods does not need a website. However, if the same corner store was importing specific type of product from overseas that is not widely available in Australia, then you have what is called a niche market. You should certainly consider a website to promote that product.
A particular group of businesses that I always recommend to have a website are servicing business such as
Electricians
Plumbers
Cleaners
Builders
Carpenters
Tiling specialists
Pest control specialist
Personal Trainers
The question is why? Well in most cases these people work as a sole traders or a small company that has a limited or no budget towards advertising. However they rely on local newspapers, flyers and yellow pages.
Lets says a home cleaning company decides to run 10000 copies of a flyer and distribute it in their local area to every house hold. Now how many would actually respond to that campaign? And how many was actually wasted, and never even made in to that house and was disposed as junk mail?
Same goes for local news paper you place an advertisement in the local news papers and gets printed in 2 or 3 suburbs and the total cost in a month could easily be in excess of $300 - $400 for that month. You should ask your self how many people did actually call you for your services?
This form of advertising is known as mass media advertising, what you need to focus on is targeted advertising. For instance if I need a local cleaning company to come and do some work around the house for me I will go and look for them.
However what do I do to find them? Do I check my mail box in the hope that there will be a flayer from a cleaning company in my mail box? Or I pick up the local news paper dropped off in front of my house last night and hope there might be an add in there for cleaning? Or do I go to the garage and fins that copy of good old yellow pages collecting dust and used as a brick to hold the door open and look for a cleaning company? Well may be...
I can guarantee in most cases when you need a servicing company you will not have any of the above available to you, so what do you do? Well the simplest way is you Google it.
Google-It is becoming a common everyday term to tell some one look them up on the Internet. We all use it and have used it and are very comfortable with it. So can your business be Googled?
Then you need to talk to some one about what you can do about it having your business available to your market 24/7 in a much wider community than 2 or 3 suburbs.
So this is how you know if a website is right for your business, if you feel that people cant find you with your current methods of advertising.
Read our next article about the costs associated with having a website.
How can my wbesite be found on Google?
Google Organic SEO
There really are 2 methods of finding a website on the Internet in this case we use Google, since Google has over 80% of the global intenet search Traffic and less than 20% to tall other search engines and directories.
Which are Google Organic and Google AdWord.
They are both part of a process known as SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is simply making your exiting or development of you website Search Engine Friendly (SEF) in a manner to that Google can look though it and read its content easily.
When Google reads the content of you website it gets indexed, as in every page will be listed by Google in their search directory to what the page content is related to.
For example you have website about gardening, each one of the pages in your website will talk about a specific title or aspect of gardening. The SEO process is about making sure that those pages are setup developed and configured to a set of keywords that talk about those pages and tell Google what this particular page is about.
So when people search Winter Gardens and if you a pages about winter flowers and gardens, than your pages gets displayed on Google based on the related keyword or keyphrase. This would be called Google Organic Search. This process normally takes a while to be effective can take up to 3 – 6 months before getting god results.However I have seen results in Weeks and once in about 5 days for a specific term.
Google AdWords SEM
Then there is the Google AdWords, Ad word is a process of creating a number of ads on Google based on a selected number of keyword searches that people use.
So when a person searches for gardening your AdWord ads might show up on the right hand side known as sponsored links. The ads will only show based on your Cost Per Click or CPC and your daily budget.
For example, you might have a monthly budget of $300 for advertising with Google, so you brake down the daily budget to about $10/day and you set your max bid per click to $0.50 so technically you should get about 20 visitors per day based on your budget.
This form of adverting is faster than Google organic and your ads could start showing almost instantly after the campaign is setup, however if you stop the campaign you might not get many visitors to your site.
My recommendation to all my clients is to have both AdWords and SEO for Google Organics running, simpley because they can expect to get some visitors ASAP and get some business happening, while those new customers can easily support the SEO process and cover all your costs.
This should be done until such time that the number of visitors coming to their web site is at the point that Google organics visitors can sustain the business costs with ease.
I hope this has been simple and easy to understand, if you have any questions please feel free to send us an email.
