First of all, if your small business has an existing website, congratulations! It is way ahead of its competitors who don’t even have a website yet.
Who designed your website? Is it attractive, professional, informative, orderly? Do you employ the latest “tricks” that customers expect to see, such as audio / video presentations showing your business, maps of your location, and a full description of your goods and services?
Advances on the internet and changes in search engine optimization (called SEO for short) make it imperative that you update your existing website to get to the top of search engine results. When people search Google or Yahoo for your particular type of business, you want to be at the top of the results.
In previous years, websites that were at the top of search engines were large, had hundreds (or thousands) of pages, and were designed by expensive website designers.
Not anymore, today you can update your small business website to include audio and video, you can import the latest news from your industry directly onto the website and reach the top of the search engines for a mere fraction of the cost above.
What exactly is search engine optimization and why should you care?
Compare your thinking about the Internet to the Yellow Pages.
What do you do when you want to find a business (for example, a plumber) in the Yellow Pages? You go to that heading and then the results are sorted alphabetically within that heading, right?
Well, when someone searches for a plumber on the internet, the results come back (just like the Yellow Pages) but the results are not arranged alphabetically. Instead, search engines display results based on their internal criteria. So your customer may never find your small business website on the internet unless it is at the top of search engines.
That is why it is critical that you have a website designed from the ground up with search engine optimization in mind. You must have a website that makes it to the top of the search engines, or what’s the point?