You don’t have your small business online. Why? What’s stopping you? There are many proven reasons why it’s important to have your small business online. In this blog post, we’ll focus on five. The truth of the matter is if you don’t have your small business online, you are missing out and a lot of potential customers. That’s the bottom line and it definitely affects your bottom line.

Customers expect your small business to be online.

  • Studies suggest that the majority of people expect a business to be online. They want the business to provide some kind of online content regarding their business so they can search it before deciding to use that business. If you’re business is not online, many people aren’t even going to consider your goods or services. You might as well not have a business in their eyes, and that’s not a good thing for you.

bring your small business online

Having your small business online provides users with social proof.

  • Social proof is the recognition that you are online and it provides information about your reputation. If you’re online, chances are people have talked about their experiences with you either via testimonials on your website (which are a great thing to have) or online reviews. There are now a plethora of review sites. Yelp is probably the most common. If you link to reviews or testimonials on your own website, then users will feel more confident about using your business. The experiences of your other customers will persuade them positively (or negatively) on whether to work with you.

A web presence saves you money on advertising.

  • If you build a website and use a free building tool like WordPress, you can save a lot of money on website development. WordPress is a great tool and it’s very interactive. You don’t need to know how to code to build a professional-looking website. You will have to pay for hosting and for the domain name, but these are nominal fees when compared with mailing out brochures or flyers. Once you have your website built, you can begin to cultivate an email list from your website traffic. These are people who are very likely interested in your products or services or they wouldn’t have given you their email to contact them. You can create professional newsletters and brochures using MailChimp or other marketing tools. MailChimp has free options that allow you to send to your newsletter to hundreds of people.

Your competitors are online.

  • In the rough and tumble world of business, you need to know that you have a leg up on the competition. If your competitors are online and you’re not, generally speaking people will buy from them and not you. That’s going to hurt your business in both the short term and the long run. Get your small business online ASAP.

You’ll never really be closed for business.

  • This doesn’t mean you have to work 23/7, however your website will be. Your website is always open and ready for business. You can still keep your current business hours. However, if someone is searching and wishing to buy your products or services at 3am, they can. An online store can also dramatically increase sales because people from other geographic locations can purchase your goods. This creates revenue streams you may never have even thought of.

We hope you’ll stay tuned to our blog to find out how to maximize your website so it brings you a steady stream of potential customers. We’re Solo SEO and we know SEO can work for you, but first you have to be online.