Why Does My Business Need a Website?

Any business no matter what the industry, product or service can not afford to do business without a website. A website is quite simply the most affordable advertisement available. Consider the amount of money you spend on advertisement every month. Maybe it’s $1,500 to your local radio station, $500 to the newspaper, $500 to Google Adsense or some other pay-per-click advertiser, or even just $30 per week in an advertisement only paper. Even at the lowest cost of the previous options the yearly cost would be $1560 per year. I guarantee there is not any successful business out there spending anywhere near $1500 per year in advertisement. That would be an unbelievable bargain!

Fortunately, a website is much more cost effective. Generally speaking you can find a professional company to build your business a website for as low as $1500. Of course there’s a lot a variation depending on the amount of work required. Some sites can cost in access of $10,000. This is not the norm but even if it were it would still be a bargain!

How many people read your local paper or listen to the radio station you advertise on? Even if everyone in your town saw or heard your ad the amount of impressions would likely be less than 25,000 impressions since a majority of cities in the United States are less than 25,000.Obviously, there’s no way everyone would see your ad. If you’re lucky maybe 5% would. The chances of those 5% being interested in your product or service also reduces the quality of the impressionable audience by another 50% or more. Certainly not everyone who sees or hears your ad will be interested in what you’re offering.

However, say for instance you sell laptop computers. You’d find during  April 2009 there were over 5 million searches done on Google for the exact term laptop computers. There’s a few things to be considered though. This example is only using one of the major search engines and only one specific search term. There’s many additional searches for; notebook computers, laptops, mac laptops and so on. The variations are endless yet all relevant. In some cases extremely relevant . Let’s say for instance your business is again a laptop computer dealer located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. If someone were to do a search for Wisconsin laptop dealers and you ranked at the top of the results, the odds you’d get the sale would be greatly improved. Almost every search that’s done on a search engine results in a direct impression of an interested consumer. Impressions equal sales.

So how do you rank at the top of the search results? Without question, don’t try and cut corners to save a few bucks. There’s a lot of people out there who claim to be web designers . There’s people who use site builders or other template programs to build websites. Maybe they even produce something that looks good but looks do not get you ranked high in search results. The makeup or coding of your site and content is what gets you ranked high in search results and only trained professionals can create websites that can produce such results. Even if the initial cost is a bit expensive, as stated earlier don’t under-estimate the investment return  from a properly built site.

Sure, there are many things to consider when choosing a web designer including their previous work’s look and feel, ease of navigation and their knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO) or in layman’s terms, how search engines read the website.

Simply put, find your business a good web design firm and you’ll find your business sales.

If you’d like a complimentary website consultation please contact me, Joshua Argall Web Designer for deVision Web Design. You can reach my office by phone at 414-815-9620 or by email josh@devisonllc.com.

About the Author

Joshua Argall is a Web Designer for deVision Web Design and Development. See his work at http://devisionllc.com