Having a website is like advertising your business in the yellow pages of yesteryears. A top Google ranking website lets you reach potential customers and pre-sells your products and services. What is the price of not having a website in today's business context? A lot!
By Azmi Adnan
For every business entity that exists today, there is a website that goes along with it. Having a website is like advertising your business in the yellow pages of yesteryears. A top Google ranking website lets you reach potential customers and pre-sells your products and services. What is the price of not having a website in today’s business context? Seriously, a lot. It is something that no business can do without.
When previously we visit a travel agent to purchase our plane tickets, today we do it at a click of a mouse on our home computer from service providers such as priceline.com and at a cheaper price too. In some cases, we can even choose our preferred seats and our in-flight meals. We used to book our hotel rooms from travel agents too but now when can do it directly from the hotel website or from discount wholesalers such as hotel.com. The business gameplan has changed. Today, business is conducted at the speed of thought.
Unless you are a big entity that everyone knows about such as American Airlines, Citibank, or Amazon, letting your customers find you in the crowded world wide web can be complicated. Firstly, you need to understand the surfing habits of people looking for information. Surfers hardly go beyond the first page of a search engine and even if they do click on your link to view you site, you generally have about 7 seconds to engage them before they leave. Unless you are very good at copywriting and designing web pages, I suggest you outsource this task to people who are experts in this field, and there are plenty of them around.
Besides the importance of having a top Google ranking or having a top 3 positions in the generic search result of the search engines, there are also other ways of letting your customers reach you. If you own a specialist store for wines for example, you can distribute flyers to your customers and let them know where you can be found in cyberspace. You can even collect email addresses of your customers and start sending ezines and updates on your products and services to them. The idea is not to sell to everyone, but to a select group of people who has shown and interest in your business and keep selling to them. The fact that your customers visited your store pre-qualifies them.
This article is to establish that if you need to survive in today’s business environment, a website is an essential instrument to reach to your customers. If your are building a new customer base based on your presence in cyberspace, than having a top Google ranking or a first page ranking in the other search engines is your priority task. However, you can also take advantage of your current customers who visit your store and build a relation with them through newsletters with a link to your site. In any case, in this digital age, you need to reach out to your customers and offer greater convenience and value through the world wide web.
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Besides some coding, generating traffic to a website follows the same pattern: write quality content, submit to search engine directories, backlink using articles and trade links with relevant web sites. It's a formula that's easy to follow. Thanks for the article.
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