Why we think every business needs a website.

You are in Thomson Local, you are in the Yellow Pages, but the phone does not ring? Why?

The big question is “Are you on Google?“.

Lately we have been speaking to quite a few folks who we are promoting our web services too, who do not have presence on Google. It is usually one of two things:

• They have no website at all.
• The website is not doing it’s job.

If we take our case as an example, if you Google “enVirtua” we are what you find, which is the goal. We don’t achieve this any shady search engine optimisation (SEO) “tricks”, just through having a site designed to promote our business. It is just application of appropriate design and so forth. What often suprises people is when we talk to them about how many hits we (and our clients) get from people Googling their company name, rather than their service or product.

It is the way people work now days, if you havn’t got the number for the company you want to call you Google them.

So what we suggest to poeple is this, first you need to have a website. It’s up there with having a telephone or a desk now days. If you don’t have a website, people will wonder about you as an organisation. Second, that website although not needing to be super fancy, with all the “bells and whistles” does need to look modern and look like it was done professionally. It is a bit like wearing a business suit to a meeting, you don’t want to wear a cheap suit or one that is too over the top (the bright blue suit, with even brighter lining I had in my early twenties springs to mind).

Your website also needs to have your company name in plain text on every page, along with your contact details. Here on our site we put our contact email and phone number over there on the right. We also have the company name and location in the “Metatags” and also in MicroFormats on each and every page. This helps search engines identify the company and where we are. That way the UK-centric versions are more likely to show us.

We like to think that if you wanted to call us and couldn’t remember the number all anyone needs to do is type the company name into a search engine and the first result “should” take you to us. From there you should see ight away the number to ring. Is that the same for your business? We hope so, if not then it might mean people can’t find you easily and maybe don’t ring.

You must remember also that people will Google you for a variety of reasons, and you want to make sure that whatever it is your company does is included on your website. So we encourage our clients to share as much about what they do on the website as they can. Create a blog perhaps and talk about services you are delivering or products you have launched.

Write pages about the way your products can be used. Not just the specifications or the features. Write about how it works in everyday use, we have started trying this ourselves in the recent posts about the shared network drive feature of our CloudBackup software. The feature is dry and dull, but how it can be used from anywhere via a web interface was/is really interesting. The more genuine content you can share online about what your business does the more “discoverable” your company becomes online and that should lead to the phone ringing more often.

So… search your company name on Google today, if you don’t show up or worse a site you don’t control comes up first give us a call on 020 7193 8987. We would love to help your business get found and get that phone ringing more.