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Life-changing benefits of a website for small businesses
The greatest mistake you can make today is underestimating the benefits of a website for small businesses. In our new digital age, having a robust online presence isn't just an option anymore for small businesses—it's mandatory. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected through the internet, with a new website being built every three seconds, more and more businesses are turning to websites to showcase their brand, and for a good reason. Websites have the power to transform your business… and your life!
The short answer is yes! But, let me paint you a picture so you grasp the full importance.
It’s 9 pm and a random thought just popped into my head “I need to get my car detailed!” I fire up Google and search for the nearest Auto Detailer. They don’t have a website and are closed until tomorrow. What do I do? I move on to the next one “Oh great, they have a website!” Not only do they operate online, but I see they have their prices and services listed. They even have an appointment booking system! I selected my service, booked an appointment, and now my car is looking as spiffy as ever! Guess what? I just became that detailer’s customer! And I’ll keep going back again and again.
What about the detailer who didn’t have a site? They had no way for me to reach them outside of business hours and so they lost me as a potential lifetime customer.
This doesn’t just happen to auto detailers, but to all small businesses who underestimate the benefits of a website, be it a barber shop, bakery, restaurant, etc; They constantly lose out on opportunities to be found online and potentially become someone’s go-to service. This loss is greater than most business owners realize since 76% of consumers look at online presence before physically visiting a business, according to PR Newswire. That’s tens of thousands of dollars in potential revenue annually that you lose out on just because people don’t know you exist!
A website is what tethers you to the potential customers in your city and if that line is broken, they will find another that is more accessible and convenient for them.
Aside from the obvious one being that people know you exist and can reach you 24/7, a website has plenty of benefits, some of which you might have yet to realize.
Ever heard the saying “A first impression lasts a lifetime?” Because they do, especially on the web! A website is like a door-to-door salesman, they only have mere seconds to make an impression before a homeowner decides to listen or slam the door. When someone searches for your business, they will see your site and make assumptions about your business based on criteria like:
The more of these your users can check off, the better they can frame your business and most likely buy from you time and time again, otherwise, they bounce!
Unfortunately, not everyone gets this right. Some businesses don’t take pride in their site and fail to maintain it. As a result, their content is outdated and looks unprofessional. Some sites don’t even have SSL security (the lock icon on the left of the URL search bar). This is a huge red flag to most people since Google Chrome will display a security warning.
These types of businesses end up acting surprised when they don't get any clients from their websites. Of course, you wouldn’t! You don’t take pride in your top salesman. They are basically knocking door-to-door with stains on their shirt, a sour attitude, and a vibe that feels shady to homeowners, expecting to get a sale. It just isn’t going to happen! Worst of all, if the users have a poor experience on the site, 88% of them don’t come back!
If you want to leave an impression that lasts a lifetime to users and sell to them, then take pride in your website like you would a top salesman. Regularly make updates to your content. Always showcase your awards, reviews, and team members. Prioritize a professional and smooth user experience and people will be wowed.
A lot of local businesses that lack an online presence typically rely on word of mouth for their advertising. While this can be a good way to get clients, it often takes a very long time to grow and one bad impression is all it takes for this method to fizzle out. Online traffic, however, can be one of the best sources of leads for your business and if done right, will have you saying DJ Khalid’s famous line “suffering from success/” Yes… you will have too many customers!
Billions of people use the internet and make up online traffic. Well-built and maintained websites are phenomenal for attracting this kind of traffic and provide internet surfers an opportunity to connect with your business if they come across your site. Although not everyone will become a customer, a small percentage will, and over time, you can increase that percentage by directing more traffic to your site. How can we achieve this? Through two key methods.
The first is to optimize your site to generate leads and turn them into customers. This can be done by passing the “Three-Second Test,” a conversion test designed to determine if a random stranger can understand your website. The test is done by showing someone unfamiliar with your site a screenshot of the first section of your homepage. Next, you see if they can accurately tell you what you sell in three seconds. If they can’t, then you need to go back to the drawing board with your content because you’re probably losing out on a lot of conversions. In addition to the test, you can do the following to get more leads:
SEO is a very powerful tool and one that should not be overlooked, especially for small businesses. SEO can do things like:
What exactly is SEO?
To put it simply, SEO is the process of increasing your website’s visibility on search engines like Google and Bing by making all kinds of improvements and optimization to your site. These range from the structure of your content to keywords used in the blue titles you see on Google (title tags) and the text underneath them (meta tags).
A lot typically goes into SEO and it can get very technical so I won’t go into too much depth here but essentially, SEO is what allows people to find your site easier and become customers. As time goes on, SEO is being seen as a more viable option for advertising since you get more leads in a longer period of time for far less than Google ads. According to Search Engine Land, the SEO economy will reach $1.22B by 2028 because of how effective it is for getting results for any business.
Overall, ranking higher will increase your local and global traffic with the best case scenario being that you rank for the top three results on Google which get 75% of clicks. This can however take a very long time depending on your industry and the competitiveness of keywords for said industry. The effort can be worth it though since people just find you without any extra work on your end. You basically have a passive advertising system at that point and you don’t even have to pay for clicks or site visits! As a bonus, you easily beat out local competitors because chances are, they’re probably not investing as heavily into SEO.
Good SEO can be achieved by making sure your text and headlines use wording that reflects what customers would search for on your site. For example;
“Best birthday cake baker in California”
Having keywords like “birthday cake,” ” baker,” and “California” sprinkled throughout your content will help rank you over time in SEO. Another ranking factor is good usability experience which can be improved by the Three Second Test mentioned in the point about site conversions.
If you want to learn more about SEO and how to increase your rankings, feel free to read about SEO in this article by Search Engine Land.
Combining good SEO with a conversion-optimized site can scale to a large degree, yielding exponential results over time and skyrocketing the number of customers you see daily. Online traffic is also harder to fizzle out and can grow faster than relying on word of mouth or someone stumbling into your physical location.
So far we’ve talked about businesses that could use websites to get more clients/sales, but what about businesses that have too many clients and struggle to serve them all? Websites can help with that too!
In business, time is money, and if you or your employees’ time is being burnt up by being tied to the phone all day answering the same questions from callers or scheduling their reservations then you might as well be burning your money! Businesses that are lucky enough to suffer from this problem often end up reaching full capacity very quickly and have a harder time scaling. As a result, they need to hire more employees which becomes very costly.
What if there was a way to reduce the amount of time on the phone answering questions so you can impact more people? What if you could even potentially double the number of products you sell?
This is where websites start to become incredible time-savers and automate certain tasks for you. All you need to do is add the following functionalities to your site, some of which are pretty easy to do and should be standard on all websites
This is a pretty obvious one but believe it or not, some people still don’t have contact forms on their site! These are great for customers to ask your business any questions that the site might not have answered or for someone looking to collaborate with you. Best of all, neither of you has to spend any time on the phone! Contact forms can also generate leads for you because if someone takes the time to fill them out, then they are most likely interested in your product and it becomes much easier to follow up with them and get the sale.
Pro tip: Have a reCAPTCHA system on all your forms to prevent spam from bots
In addition to contact forms, an extra step you can take is live chat functionality. I normally would recommend integrating Facebook’s business page live chat plugin, but unfortunately, they are getting rid of the feature on May 9, 2024. An alternative is Crisp Live Chat which integrates seamlessly to your site with embedded code and even has an app to check incoming messages.
If you want to learn more about Crisp and integrate it into your site, check out this video.
“I can do 2 pm on Tuesday.” “Sorry, we’re booked at that time, how about 11 am on Wednesday?” “I can’t I’ll be at work”, “Ok how about…”
If you are an appointment-based business, then that conversation sounds dreadfully familiar. You and a client are on the phone for several minutes trying to book an appointment, going back and forth with your availability. Solution? Appointment systems on your site! Similar to contact forms, these are great for generating leads since they take out most of the friction from customers who want to schedule an appointment. All the booking times are on the site at a glance and you both skip the calendar struggle. You can also customize the forms to get specific information from the user about the reservation they want to make so both of you are on the same page.
Appointment systems are simple to implement too. Depending on your industry, there are usually designated booking systems designed for your business. An example is the app known as “The Cut” for barbershops. Ideally, some of these apps have a paid version that offers embedded code that can be placed on your site to display their calendar system (you can ask the software customer support team for a demo to get the code if they have it). If your industry doesn’t have one of these systems, then Calendly works pretty well. Just follow these steps to get the embed code:
As a business owner, it can probably get frustrating answering the same questions multiple times every day. This is a pretty simple fix. On your site, add your general information (contact, business hours, and all locations) on the footer of your site. This is a web standard and the information should be included on all pages.
Additionally, make a list of frequent questions clients ask your business on a daily basis and create an FAQ section on your homepage as well as a dedicated FAQ page to eliminate excess calls. FAQs are a great way for people to get the full picture of what you offer and create a frame in their mind about your company.
Although this is probably the hardest to implement, eCommerce stores are a great way to serve more clients and passively too while selling more units of your products. If you have physical products in your business, skincare/haircare products in barbershops for instance, then you can take these items and sell them on your site. Customers can now buy these items and do so in bulk without making a trip to your store every time. As a bonus, you save even more time because you don’t have to make a physical transaction.
Again, this is the most time-consuming to implement because you will have to build additional pages on your site and create a product and checkout system. Luckily, Webflow makes this very simple with its dynamic content management system and eCommerce templates, so that’s a great place to start. You will also need to connect with a shipping fulfillment company to ensure a good delivery service for your products. The upside is that an eCommerce store, just like a website, serves you for life and only has to be built once. Afterwards, everything is essentially automated and you only have to worry about order fulfillment (that can be automated too).
Last, but certainly not least is trust and credibility! Remember how I said your website is your top salesman? You don’t want someone selling to you who doesn’t present themselves as an expert or trustworthy, do you? Of course not! You want the person who people can vouch for. The person who makes you feel reassured and confident in your decision to purchase. Well… the same goes for your site. Trust and credibility let people know that customers are vouching for you and establish your brand as a reliable expert in your industry.
Most online users read reviews and use them as major criteria in their purchasing decisions. According to Power Reviews, 99.9% of consumers read reviews before purchasing online, and 57% of them look at brick-and-mortar stores. That’s a lot of people if you ask me, so make sure your site has as many of the indicators below as possible.
The more of these indicators you can check off, especially, reviews and SSL, the more your customers feel confident and at ease. Indicators also tell people you’re not fishy or a scammer, which there are plenty of nowadays.
Reviews and security aren’t the only ways to build credibility, you can also present your past work in galleries and portfolios or case studies. As a baker, roofer, pool builder, etc; you can take beautiful pictures of your work and display them as a gallery on your site and even add testimonials next to the images. If you are a law firm, you can have a case study page where you analyze a past court case (only if acceptable of course, and with client permission) and showcase the results you got for your client. These are just a few examples, you can get creative with it and any business can do it.
Finally, storytelling is another tool in your arsenal to not only establish trust but to connect with your audience. Really let your users know who you are as a business, the values that represent your brand, and why you do what you do. Give them a reason to connect with your mission statement and feel as if they are a part of something bigger. You’d be surprised at how many businesses overlook impactful copyright messages and instead opt for generic and bland text.
Storytelling can be done through impactful text and headlines but also with images of your team members and the work they do as well as individual pages for each employee that clients will interact with. These pages can showcase things like their headshot, experience, and bio. This information helps potential customers see exactly who you are as a brand instead of perceiving you as a faceless entity.
If you made it this far, then you really have my gratitude because this is probably the longest blog (or any writing for that matter) that I have ever written, so we should probably recap.
Websites are a standard in today’s .com era and the lifeline of businesses that come in all sizes. A website can be the difference between barely surviving month-to-month with a dry stream of clients, to skyrocketing your revenue every year. In this blog, we discussed exactly how a website can help you achieve that result by offering the following benefits to your business:
In conclusion, investing in a website for your small business is not just about staying relevant in the digital landscape; it’s about unlocking powerful opportunities that lead to growth, efficiency, and success. Embrace today’s online world and harness the virtually unlimited power of the internet to significantly transform your business and your life.
