Why Every Small Business Should Have a Website

People often ask me “do I really need a website for my small business?”, my answer to this questions is always the same: “absolutely, if you own a business, you should have a website even if your business is small and sells products or services that you don’t think can be sold online”.  Most customers prefer to visit your website to check your company or products than to visit you in person. A study conducted by MineWhat showed that “81% of shoppers research online before buying.” This statistic shows the importance of owning a website for your small business growth.

There are many ways that your business can be benefited from owning a website. I summarized five main advantages of owning a website for your business below.

Gain business credibility

A study conducted by Verisign stated that 84% consumers consider small businesses with a website are more credible than ones without. Nowadays, most consumers are surfing the internet to search for local products and services they need. With this in mind, your small business will gain credibility by owning a website.

Your business online identification card

Similar to your identification card, your website is your business online identification card. It is the first place where your customers or clients will do research about your company, and your products or services before they decided to do business with you. Furthermore, your website provides an instant visual presentation of your business. It is quite expensive especially for a small company to advertise on a local television, but your business website can provide those visualization elements and it is always available to anyone. If a customer has questions that can be better answered on your website than over the phone or email, this will be a good addition to your customer service.

Increase your potential target market

One of the major advantages of having a website is that you get more exposure nationally and internationally. Although it may not be the goal of every small and medium size business to go international, your business website can help you to increase exposure to more people all over the world. For a company that provides niche product or services, your website can be a very powerful advertising tool to reach out to your specific target customers.

Increased convenience for your customers

In this day and age, many business transactions are happening online. This is because people seek convenience shopping experience and your company website can fulfill those needs. Your customers or clients can get information on a specific items or services easily, they can purchase your products anytime and most importantly, they can conveniently contact you through your website and give you feedback.

Access to valuable information

Your website is a good place to collect valuable information that can be used to evaluate your business performance. For example, you can use digital market intelligence platforms like SimilarWeb to get statistic data on how many people have visited your site and your website ranking. In addition, your website can offer other information such as how many people have messaged or emailed you. You can utilize all these valuable information to make an update and make an adjustment to your product and marketing materials anytime.

Conclusion

Overall, the money and time that you invested in creating a website will be all worthy because it can improve your business performances significantly by facilitating online presence for your company, marketing channel to target your target audiences and statistical information to monitor your business growth. Apart from an Alexa ranked website as ForwardAI, you may need good online accounting software to run your bookkeeping and accounting tasks. Forwardly is free online accounting software designed for small businesses, offering a delightful and easy-to-use interface with many great features. Try it now and see it for yourself!