Are you asking yourself, “do I need a website for my business?”

If your business doesn’t have a website in 2020, you’re doing it all wrong.

No matter what you sell, you need a website to give your customers a place to go to get an idea of who you are and what you do. When a customer can’t find you online, you can bet that they’ll find your competitor’s website and you’ll lose their business.

Even if you’re an old fashioned business owner, you have to be able to adapt to how things are done nowadays. Today, we’re going to tell you the top 10 reasons why EVERY business needs a website and give you a few tips on how to make one that will help you boost sales and get more meaningful leads.

We live in a digital age and not having a website will set you back, but it’s never too late to catch up.

1. People Look At Websites First

Nearly 90% of all customers go online before anything else to search for products and services. Your website is the equivalent of someone finding your brick and mortar location, so if you don’t have one, these consumers will assume that you don’t exist.

It’s also important to remember that people, in general, are impatient when it comes to products and services that they want. Not too many are going to search high and low to find your company website when one of your competitors is much easier to find.

2. You Can Show What You Do

When you start building it, you can view your website as a blank slate to show your customers what it is that you do. Display your products and services, give some background on yourself and your company, and leave your contact information so that they can get hold of you.

You can create as in-depth a website experience as you want. Ecommerce companies do all of their business directly on their website, while more local services like plumbers or car dealerships display their products and services so that you can do some research before you contact them. It’s all up to you.

3. Sell Your Products

If you run a company that manufactures products, you’d be remiss not to take advantage of customers far and wide that might want to shop with you. Allowing on-site purchases can turn your small business into a multinational company.

Quality businesses should always display products and allow shoppers to put them in their virtual shopping cart to purchase later. You’re leaving money on the table if you do it any other way. It’s all about customer convenience.

4. Communicate With Your Customers

Giving your customers an easy way to contact you with any questions or concerns is a must on a business website. It’s mutually beneficial for yourself and the customers for an open line of communication to exist between you.

Unlike your physical location, your website is open for business 24-hours per day, 7-days per week. Your customers can go online and shop around your site whenever they want and being able to make inquiries about products is a basic right for a paying customer.

For you, the business, your website allows you to communicate any news or updates to your customers, like changes to your hours or new products that you’re introducing.

5. Reach Customers You Otherwise Wouldn’t

The internet doesn’t have any boundaries, so you can use your website to attract customers from pretty much anywhere. We’ll discuss exactly how you can do that a little bit later, but for now, we’ll look at the sheer facts.

People in the biggest cities and the smallest villages across the world have access to the internet. These people will never be able to get to your brick and mortar, but they can stumble upon your website and learn about your company.

6. Saves You Time and Money

When it comes to advertising your business, having a website saves you an enormous amount of time, stress, and money. What you might have had to take an ad out in the paper to promote before is a few mouse clicks away from being on the front page of your website.

Web hosting and custom website costs are next to nothing when you compare it to the revenue it brings in. As you get more and more comfortable with working on the internet, you’ll likely end up transitioning more and more of your business to your site. It’s just faster, cheaper, and easier to do business this way.

7. Blogging and SEO

You’ll hear a lot of internet experts talk about the importance of content for the promotional side of your business. Content can come in many forms, but one of the most popular is a company blog, accessed through your website.

Having a blog is a must and when you start looking around the room at your competitors, you don’t want to be the only one without a blog. You can use your blog to establish yourself as an expert in your field.

When you start blogging, you’ll begin to hear more about search engine optimization, which is an important digital marketing tool for getting noticed. The better your SEO is, the more people will be able to find you via Google search. Your blog plays a big part in SEO, but so does the overall functionality of your website.

If your site is fast and easy to navigate, Google will reward you by ranking you farther up the SERP. And, if you’ve got a popular blog that discusses relevant and informative topics relating to your business, your posts will rank ahead of other similar ones. Once you have readers, you can direct them to shop on your website.

8. It’s Easy Now

Arguably the biggest reason to have a website these days is because it’s so easy to build a site from scratch with website builders these days. Builders like Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress all make it easy to select templates and drag and drop different components onto your site.

What you’ll be left with is a professional-looking, functional, and completely unique site for your business that’ll attract and satisfy customers for years to come.

“Do I Need a Website?”

You shouldn’t be asking yourself, “do I need a website?”, because if you look around, you’ll notice that every reputable business has a website. What you should be doing, however, is figuring out how to optimize your website so that it’s better and more attractive than your competitors’ sites. It’s constant work, but it pays off.

Did you enjoy this post? Come back and visit us again for more on business, technology, and advertising.