Local websites for local businesses

Check out this article that is on the Telegraph’s website for small and home based businesses.

Can you believe that, “Domino’s Pizza has now sold £25.3m worth of pizza via its web activities which now account for over a fifth of delivered pizzas sold in the UK and typically generate an above-average order value?”

Who would have thought that a pizza delivery company in the UK would be able to sell that much pizza through their website?!

80% of offline sales are started online

Also, “Retail analysts believe ‘internet-influenced’ sales are grossly underestimated. Official figures suggest that more than 80% of the sales generated by web sites are being completed offline – the important point being that they were initiated online. Without a serious website, then, businesses can’t hope to capture any such sales.”

So, given that, why are there still many small local businesses without a web presence?

I believe that small business owners, and particulary those running locally focused businesses, don’t think that they need a website because a website resides on the ‘world wide’ web, and they think “what’s a local business going to do with a ‘world wide’ marketing tool”!

And they are so wrong.

Local Businesses must have a web presence

More and more people are searching online for local businesses, born out by the statistics above. Where do you go when you need to find a local business; as you are reading this I would guess that you go to Google more than you do offline paper directories. And when you look for a local business, what do you put in the search box. You will of course put in the type of business or service that you are looking for and then you will usually add in your local area (although you don’t necessarily need to do that – Google has introduced a more ‘intelligent’ search that will try to give you local results automatically based on your ip address, or on the area that you specify in your Google account).

You then get a list of local businesses, showing either their Google Maps entry, an entry in a directory, or their own website and then who do you call or visit?

I would suggest that it will more often than not be the businesses with a website that you can go to so that you have a chance to find out a bit more about them and their products and services before taking any further action.

What do local business owners need to do?

So, what does that mean for local business owners and websites? It means that they need one, and it needs to include local information so that they stand a chance of being found when a local person does a local search looking for a local business.

And getting a website set up these days is not the costly inflexible affair that it was in the past.  We use WordPress for our websites, which is extremely search engine friendly straight out of the box and can be further enhanced by using other techniques like getting the right them and plugins and ensuring that you regularly add fresh relevant content.

If you would like to find out more about how we can help you to set up a WordPress site then have a browse round our website and get in touch.

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Tagged as: Business, Google, Google Maps, Search Engines, small business, Website