Do I need a website for my business

Almost every business has a website in 2020, your website is often the first time any customer will see your brand. First impressions matter, so it’s important to make it a good one.
It can be tough deciding to invest in a new business website. If your unsure, take a look at our reasons below:

Reason #1: Does my website meet my customer expectations?

A good website journey drives customers through to enquiries and purchases. Carefully think about content layouts, call to actions and the next step on pages will ensure customers engage throughout your site with minimal effort.

People are searching for you online, it’s a fact. Whether it’s a direct search for your business or a relatable keywords, your customer expect to find you.

Reason #2: My competitors all have company websites?

It’s a given, almost every competitor in your market will have a website. This means you must outrank your competition to be found online. If your website does not rank highly among the competition then you’ve some work to do to reach the top spot.

Look at your competitor’s websites, what are they doing right and what are they doing wrong. Researching how your competitor’s websites is great way to ensure you can achieve better results online. However when it comes to a new website for your business you can consider all this in your marketing strategy.

Reason #3: Increase traffic to my website

There are hundreds of methods to increase traffic to your website. The simplest of which is advertising on social media, magazines and any form of offline marketing. As a result this can be a fantastic way of spreading word about your business, however, this can be near on impossible to track, as there’s no record of where they have found you.

A more advanced and technical way is to look at SEO. SEO, if you have never heard of it stands for Search Engine Optimisation, it’s simply what Google, Yahoo and other search engines use to rank your website.

Without going into incredible amounts of detail about this, you can increase your rankings on Google by using methods like keywords, speed optimisation, blog writing, backlinking and other techniques. Albeit SEO may not give you immediate results, long term, this will be the most valuable investment into your website.

Please note, however, if done incorrectly, you can throw a ton of resources into something and won’t see results. This is why we would always recommend looking for a specialist to help you out. Although SEO can be expensive, when done correctly the return on investment will outweigh the cost.

Reason #4: Looking for a way to increase enquiries

Great, you’ve got the traffic, but you’re not converting! Just because you have the people coming to your website doesn’t guarantee you make the sale. Make sure your site super easy to use, clear in its content and is relevant to your audience.

For instance, imagine you are in a shop, you desperately need the toilet but they are hidden away in the back. You do circles around the place to try find them and by which point you’re frustrated and desperate, you may even go to another shop.

Now picture the same situation with a dotted line on the floor and overhead signs pointing you in the right direction, you find the toilet, come out as happy customer.

The understanding of driving enquiries isn’t just flooding your website with words and pictures, it’s all about ensuring your websites journey is on point. Clever use of buttons, content and navigation will organically direct people to where they want to be.

This creates a natural path to enquiries without the need of hard selling.

Reason #5: Is my website trustworthy?

I’ll ask you a question, when you visit a companies website do you instantaneously judge the credibility by appearance? If you do, you’re not alone. 75% of website users admit to making judgements about a company’s credibility based on the design alone.

This begs the question then, do you feel comfortable with how your website looks. Better yet take a step back and put yourself in your customer’s position. If you wouldn’t feel comfortable purchasing from your own site or even trust the way it looks, your potential customers will feel the same.

In conclusion, The most important thing when focusing on the way your website is designed is how it ties in with your brand. You have spent an awful lot of time making yourself credible, it’s important your site does the same.

Reason #6: It’s impossible to add new content to my website

Content is an important asset to every website, so ensuring you can update your website is a basic requirement you should have. If updating content on your website means paying a developer a lot of money each time, it may be time to think about change.
Building your website within a content management system eliminates this issue. A simple and easy to use platform enables you to update your site without any technical knowledge.

Reason #7: It takes what seems like a lifetime for my website to load

How long would you wait for a webpage to load before leaving never to return? Two seconds? five seconds?
These days people aren’t even willing to wait a second for a web page to load. According to Google, 400 milliseconds (literally the blink of an eye) is too long. It’s no secret that people will visit a website less often if the load time is slow.
Consumers won’t wait for you. 47% of consumers expect a page to fully load within two seconds while 40% would abandon a website that takes more than three seconds.
Your website can load slowly for a variety of reasons; too many features, huge image sizes, un-necessary video or even ads. As a matter of fact, it’s also common for “out-of-the-box” website builders to cause slower load times. As the name suggests, they are a product that offers a solution for everyone. With a feature for everything, you’ll probably only use 10% of these on your site. In other words the other 90% of the features will working against you, inevitably slowing down your site.

Reason #8: My website isn’t mobile responsive

While you may have a website, chances are it’s not responsive if it doesn’t look good or work well on mobile. Once upon a time, this didn’t matter a great deal, smartphones had black and white screens and buttons, but today this couldn’t be more different.
Over 45% of all internet use comes from mobile devices in the UK
Over 40% of purchases on websites were made from a mobile device.
It is crucial your website is compatible across all devices. The above statistics give an insight into what you could be missing out on. Almost half of all possible sales could be lost if your site doesn’t cater to your mobile and tablet users.