Regardless of industry, a business’s internet presence can have a significant impact on its performance. Sad enough, to date some or perhaps most businesses still do not recognize this and thus pay less attention to getting a business website for their business. They are oblivious of the fact that the bulk of their prospective clients or customers would do some research online to check up on a few things about what they want before making a purchase decision in this day and age.
As a business owner having a business website is very important. There are many reasons for this but the most obvious is that if your business has a website on the internet, chances that clients/prospects that search for a product/service you offer could land on your business website and perhaps buy from you. Hence, you leave so much money on the table for the competition if you don’t have a good website for your business.
A great internet presence, particularly via a website, is crucial to business growth and sustainability. Having a great website for your business can make or break your ability to generate (additional) leads, funds, and build your brand credibility as a business. Yes, the quality of your business website has an impact on your outcomes, but the point of this article is to emphasize the importance of having one.
Websites have assisted thousands of businesses of various sizes worldwide in developing their online presence and enhancing their business. Businesses are hesitant to get online in some circumstances because they believe that they are not tech-savvy enough or don’t know how to create and manage their business website. Occasionally, businesses are concerned about the cost.
The good news is that you can find a solution that works for your business’s budget. If you’re still not convinced why you need a website as a business owner, think again as not having one can be inimical to the success and growth of your business.
This article examines 12 crucial reasons you need a business website as a business owner. This article will give you some clues as to why having a business website is crucial to the success and sustainability of your business.
1. Having A Business Website Can Help to Build Your Business Competence and Credibility
One of the most important reasons for having a website for your business/company is to improve the way people perceive your business in terms of competence and credibility. There are probably other businesses that provide a service that is comparable to yours. Having a website that looks attractive and which provides useful information that solves your prospects/customers problems is one method to stand out from the crowd.
People may doubt the credibility of a company or small business if you are new to the market and lack huge budget to invest in paid adverts. Having a great website allows you to make a fantastic first and long-lasting impression and to repeatedly reassure your prospects/customers that you are a legitimate business all for a low cost.
Customer behavior is largely influenced by what others have said about your business/brand. People expect to see your website to learn more about your brand, regardless of whether it is a new startup or a long-standing business with tons of 5-star ratings on top review sites.
Customer testimonials on your website are a great way to impress potential buyers and provide social proof, especially since they are already looking for that product/service online. Besides, you can promote the awards, credentials, and testimonials that your business or company has acquired over time and any other features that will help your visitors to purchase your product(s) or service(s).
2. You Need A Business Website to Build Your Brand and Control the Narrative
While it is difficult to control what others say about your business/brand, you may shape the perception of your brand/business by publishing your business story and business activities on the internet. When it comes to helping brands promote their business vision, and mission, a business website is significantly more effective than print ads or snail mail brochures in terms of reach and cost.
One of the most crucial things that you can do to grow your business is to show your business or brand to potential buyers in the most simple and easily accessible manner. Customers are more likely to buy from you if you clearly define who you are, what you represent, what you offer, how you can help, and what you stand for. This is something that might help you stand out from the crowd, that is, from the competition. It’s difficult to do this without a website because people can’t readily locate quality and reliable information about your company or business if you don’t have a website.
3. Having a Website Makes Leads Generation Seamless
One of the most exciting reasons to have a website as a business owner is that it can boost your lead generation opportunities.
Found online, people would become interested in your product or service, and want to learn more about you, due to the information on your website. In the process, the visitors would submit their contact details in your lead capture forms which you can use for remarketing/retargeting ads thus tremendously reducing the cost of marketing your business.
Hence, having a website for your business makes it possible to collect leads for free to improve your sales. Although websites have a cost (setup and maintenance), they have an incredibly higher positive return on investment when used effectively. Lead generation for a business, for instance, is most affordable when done on the business’s official website.
4. With a Business Website, Your Business Will Gain Visibility for Free through Organic Search Traffic
Your business has a chance of appearing in Google search results if you have a website that is always online and is SEO-optimized. SEO is short for “Search Engine Optimization”. This means that if someone searches for a product or service that you offer as a business, your website may appear in the search results. This provides you with the opportunity to significantly expand your customer base via free organic traffic.
For instance, on any given day, Google, the world’s biggest search engine receives 5.6 billion searches and 63,000 searches per second, according to SEOTribunal. Consider the possibility that with such a huge volume of searches, someone is looking for your specific service or product at any given time. If your website shows up on the search engine result pages (SERPs) there is a chance of gaining a customer or money from free organic traffic.
Creating a website with free tools like WordPress content management system (CMS) doesn’t cost a lot of money, but it gives your business more leverage, especially for low-cost advertisements using free traffic from search engines. A search-engine-optimized website allows you to reach thousands of prospective customers without investing a lot of money in paid advertorials.
Moreover, it can assist you in reaching a larger audience to promote your services or products at little to no cost to your business. No matter what business you are in, the information on your website has an impact on purchasing decisions and commercial transactions in favor of your business.
People will know how to contact your business if they find your business online of which the most cost-effective and most efficient way is via your business website.
5. A Business Website Saves You Time in Providing Customer Service
Many businesses receive calls from potential or current clients/customers who inquire about their location, services/products, delivery, hours of operation, etc. When you miss a call, the customer is dissatisfied and may resort to transacting with your competitors. That said, taking excessive calls daily can divert a great deal of your business time and attention away from the most vital aspects of your business.
These calls can be reduced with the use of a website, which can also boost the internal efficiency and profitability of your business. At the same time, it assists prospecting customers and clients in locating useful information about your business without having to contact (i.e. call), resulting in a better overall experience for your business and the prospects or customer. Besides, your business website can help to strengthen the attention span of your staff especially those not assigned to customer service duties.
Your business website is your platform for answering all of your potential clients’ basic questions about your company, business, and/or brand. This is particularly true with Business to Business (B2B) marketing firms. When people come to your business website, they want to know what your business does, what products/solutions your business offer, where your business is located, how to contact your business, and so on.
Based on the information that you provide on your website, the prospective client can easily determine whether to reach out to you or transact with your business or not. If the prospect is impressed with your business offering, they can transact with your business or give up if they are not impressed enough. Just keep in mind that today’s consumers expect instant gratification. So, keep it basic and short when providing information about your business on your business website.
6. Your business Website Helps You to Publish Updates and Announcements instantly and for Free
It’s simple and most cost-effective to make updates and notifications about your business to your clients via your business website. This is because your business website is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365/6 days of the year. Thus, if you publish an announcement on or send push notifications from your business website, it will reach all of your customers at once.
Having a website as a business owner helps to keep your clientele, prospective customer, visitors, and society informed about key things your business is up to. Your business website is the cheapest avenue through which you can inform the public of your business offerings, promos, discounts, new products, upgrades/downgrades, etc. at almost no cost to your business.
7. Use Your Business Website to Tackle the Competition
Guess who gets the business if you don’t have a website? Certainly, it’s not you but rather your competitor who has a great-looking, fully-optimized, responsive website that meets the online searcher’s needs. Business is warfare. To tackle your competitors in your niche or business line – at least in the online space – having a great business website is incontrovertible.
8. Use Your Business Website to Learn More about Your Market
Did you realize that having a website for your business provides your business an ample opportunity to know what is going on in your industry? When your business website is fully optimized, it can get higher rankings on the SERPs and be in the right place at the right time. Based on metrics from the analysis of your website in comparison to your competitors you can bid for and win SERPs positions for the lucrative keywords that your competitors are ranking for.
The information from website analysis can help you improve your website’s traffic and impact your customers’ buying decisions, which usually start with research, recommendations, and end with reviews. One of the numerous strategies to take on your industry’s Goliaths is to have a prominent position on the search engine results pages (SERPs). As a result, if you don’t dominate your industry on the internet, your (prospective) clients will buy from your competitors.
9. Complement & Deal with the Limitations of Social Media
If you believe that having a social media presence is enough to attract new clients to your business, then you are mistaken. The reality is that it is not enough to have a Facebook page, Twitter handle, Instagram Page, or Tik-Tok account for your business because these are not platforms that you own entirely.
Social Media are rented platforms; you don’t have absolute control over them as you would do with your business website. All social media have policies some of which may not resonate well with certain businesses. For instance, you cannot post certain information considered hate speech on some social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Also, the promotion of certain products like drugs, supplements, firearms, etc. is not allowed on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and many other social media. The question, therefore, is, “what if your business trades in these things?” Do you go out of business because social media do not accept such goods and services to be promoted on their platforms?
Rather than depend solely on social media platforms – with their limitations and stiff regulations – many businesses today build a website for their business and use this official website for most of their marketing activities. You should consider doing the same. Yes, you can indeed enhance the ROI of your business by leveraging the social media platforms but do not solely depend on them as the main tools for the sustenance of your business.
10. Enjoy 24/7 Accessibility & Income
Having a website for your business makes it easy for visitors (prospects and clients) to access your business at any time of the day at their own pace. So, irrespective of when someone visits, your business is always accessible.
This is because a website runs all times of the day, week, month, and year and this assists with marketing and sales, which is crucial to business sustenance. Besides, constant accessibility is a step further in rendering better customer service in your business especially if you automate the customer feedback service on your business website.
11. Having a Website for Your Business helps With Digital Marketing Targeting/Retargeting
Digital marketing is a big deal these days in helping businesses to acquire and increase their leads, earnings thereby enhancing the profitability of the business. To achieve this or to make the most out of it you need a website where the visitors will land.
The historical traffic data of your website visitors can help you in streamlining your marketing/remarketing thereby getting the most out of your campaigns.
If you don’ do this, you’d not be able to get the most suitable leads for your business or obtain the highest return on your ad spend.
But what happens if you don’t have a website? You lose out!
Digital marketing and getting a website should be among the first considerations when setting up a business. So, even if you don’t plan on running paid advertisements right now, it’s essential to get your business website up and running as soon as possible to leverage the huge potential in retargeting available with digital marketing.
This is because the history of interactions by visitors to your website is crucial to enlivening your business via digital marketing and remarketing efforts.
12. Customize Your Offer Presentation to Suit User’s Needs
Most of the time, your target audience would try to visit your website as the first point of contact with your brand or business to meet their needs. This is a living fact. This gives you the rare and ample opportunity to customize your offer presentation to suit individual users’ needs.
For instance, you can provide brief video tutorials or printable PDF instructions in addition to displaying your offers with features. This helps your visitors to save time in seeing the features and benefits of what you offer, lengthens your website visitors’ time spend, reduces your website/webpage bounce rate, and may influence the decision of your prospective customer in contacting and/or trading with you as you have tailored your offer to the user’s quest.
Tips to Get Started
So far, I have covered why you should get a website for your business. I guess you now know why your business needs a website and may wish to have one as soon as possible.
So, let me show you some strategies to get started or things that you should know or get to have a website in the next couple of days or weeks.
The process is simple, very simple and it’s this:
- Get a suitable domain name.
- Buy a good web hosting.
- Pick a suitable website building platform.
- Get your website designed.
STEP #1: Get a Suitable Domain Name
A domain name is something like www.yourdomainname.com which is technically known as Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or website address. Your domain name is the address of your website on the web. It should ideally be the same as your company name.
However, sometimes the exact name that matches your company/business may not available for several reasons. In that case, you might have to opt for a domain name that reflects your company/business line, mission, or vision.
Whatever the case is, endeavor to keep the domain name of your website memorable (i.e. easy to remember) and catchy (brandy). Your website domain name is the most important digital tool for your business. So, don’t give choosing a good suitable domain name for your business/brand/company to chance.
STEP #2: Buy a Good Web Hosting
Choosing a web hosting company for your website is one decision that can make or break your business on the internet. That is why when considering a web hosting service provider you should go for a company with a good track record of site uptime, speed, stability, and great customer service. This is because the web hosting company you use for hosting your website is the holy grail of website design. If you make a mistake at this point it can cost you the entire effort of getting a good website for your business up and running. So, be careful when selecting a website hosting provider for your business website.
In picking a web hosting provider for your business website, select a service provider that has at least 99% uptime, can swiftly respond to changes, has upgradable/downgrade service plans, has efficient customer service, and is cost-effective in pricing (i.e. not too cheap, not too costly). You will appreciate the benefit of choosing a good web hosting provider as your company grows, shrinks, or undergoes other significant changes.
Some web hosting companies/providers offer both domain and hosting services which could be great for the most part as it saves time, cost, energy, and eliminates the issues with the technicality/connectivity of a website. However, you should consider this if you plan to stay with the service for a considerably long period and you know from your research that the company is good and reliable.
If you are confused, you can talk to us and we will assist you with the best web hosting services for your budget.
STEP #3: Pick a suitable website building platform.
There are many website-building platforms today through which you can build a website. The popular options today are CMS like WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace. CMS is short for “Content Management System”. In the web design world, a CMS is a software that allows you to design, build, customize, adjust, and upgrade or downgrade your website without you writing a single line of code.
Designing your website with CMS enables users to easily add new (especially, informational) content to your website. It helps you to easily and effectively manage the content (texts, graphics, infographics) on your website without you having prior web design knowledge, skills or expertise.
The use of CMS to create a website makes it very easy for anyone including people who know nothing about coding or website design to build and manage professionally-looking websites easily. CMS is the perfect solution that you can use if you do not wish to code a website from scratch or hire a developer to design, code, or make changes to your site every time you need to.
There are many CMS that you can use to design your website today. However, WordPress is the most popular, the most recommended, and the most used of them. WordPress is an open-source CMS platform for designing, building, launching, and managing a website/blog with little effort.
To design, build and launch your website, you can utilize free WordPress but I advise that you go for the paid version of WordPress as this has more functionality and benefits that you need to create a professional business website that is responsive and tailored to solving the needs of your target market.
STEP #4: Get your website designed
Website design is not a straight-line process; there are a series of steps to follow if you must have a fully functional website. Some of the crucial things to consider are the website template that you use – its uniqueness, speed, responsiveness, upgradability, etc.
In designing the website for your business carefully choose a website template that is simple to use and which doesn’t look like any of your competitors’ website pattern. After all, you don’t want your company to resemble that of your competitors.
We Can Help…
Knowing why you need a website as a business owner or why you should get your business a good website is great. It gives you an idea of how much you have left on the table for the competition and how much your business stands to gain if it has a fully functional website. So, you need to do something about it today which is to get a website for your business as quickly as possible.
Unlike what you might have been told getting a website for your business is a 100% accomplishable feat although the process can be overwhelming if you have zero or minimal experience in website design and monetization which is where we come in to help.
At Foladesign, our business is to help you make the most of your limited budget by projecting your business, your brand, your product, and your services to the world at the least cost with our custom website design solutions.
Our service offers suits all budgets and is for all categories of businesses. So, irrespective of your budget, there is a website design plan for you.
Here’s what we will do for you for just a tiny one-time fee
- We will help you to choose a suitable domain name for your business that stands you out from the competition.
- We will help you to choose a suitable web hosting service with at least 99.9% uptime and other metrics covered in this article.
- We will design and build your business website using today’s website development technologies for speed, security, responsiveness and conversion. Presently, we design most of our client sites with WordPress CMS which it the present industry standard for designing highly responsive, fast-loading, scalable, and automated websites.
- We will help you to secure and maintain your site to keep bringing your business continuous profits every year.
…and more for a pocket-friendly budget as a one-time fee payment. This covers your business website setup.
We believe in working with you to help you achieve your business/brand dreams.
We want to help you get seen, known, heard, and recognized in your city and worldwide, and providing you with a high-quality business website is the best way to achieve this at the least cost.
So, you can contact us now for a free consultation session where we help you get the most suitable web design solution for your business budget.
Wrapping Up…
Having a website for your business is indispensable in today’s competitive business world. You need a website as a business owner judging from the benefits discussed in this article and more not covered.
So, if you are yet to get a website for your business, please do so today. Note, however, that website is software and hence needs maintenance as when due. So, have this in mind when planning a website for your business.
You can get an elegant website for your budget by contacting us today. We will review your business/brand and work out a perfect website plan for your business/brand within 12-48 hours.
Rest assured that you will get a professionally designed website that stands you out from the crowd, effectively represent your brand, and meet the exact goals/needs of your business.
So, get in touch today let’s help you get your business website needs sorted at a highly affordable rate today.
