An online presence is crucial to the success of a small business. A good business website will attract visitors and convert them into paying customers. There are about 4.5 million small businesses employing 9 or less employees and generating a whopping £600bn pounds of business.
It’s a crowded and highly competitive field, with small businesses fighting to attract the attention of potential customers. A good quality website is essential if you want your business to punch above its weight.
Unfortunately, at this point there’s some good and bad news. On the positive front, a survey of 10,000 British micro-businesses has shown they’re more digitally aware than previously thought, with 81% running a website. Up until now, estimates tended to be around the 50% mark. However, despite their enthusiasm to get online, most of these sites (80%) are simply not fit for purpose in today’s digital age.
The vast majority of micro-businesses are using sites that are based on out-of-date technology. They tend to be “static”, limited to five pages and offer no content management. Hence they can’t perform the basic but essential marketing tasks, such as posting photos and publishing customer testimonials.
The end result is their site ranks very low on search engines – and even when they do attract visitors, they rarely convert them to paying customers as they project a poor image online. These businesses are effectively operating off-line and are missing huge opportunities to grow.
Most small businesses don’t know how they can start the process of improving their online presence, without spending thousands of pounds. Fly High Media, is a digital marketing agency that specialises in developing websites for start-ups and small businesses at relatively low cost.
There are nearly 130 million websites in the UK alone, so the internet is becoming a crowded marketplace. It is therefore important for small businesses to be visible to their customers and being search engine friendly. Web design companies, like Fly High Media, know how to help small businesses optimise the pages on their websites, so that search engines, like Google, rank them highly.
In summary, competition is tough for small businesses, if they are to succeed then they need a high quality, visible website that attracts visitors, builds customer engagement and sells products.
