The Tangled (Business) Web(sites) We Weave

Bad Title, Helpful Information.

Will your local business be better off with a website? Well, that depends. Is it a Restaurant? Then yes. Is it a service? Then yes. Is it a physical store with products on the shelves? Then maybe you can get away with not having one. Wait a minute, no you could really use one too (thought you could squeak by, didn’t you?).

“But, Mr. Author of this article” you may ask “it’s the year 2025 of the Common Era! Why on earth are you bringing this up now?”

Simple. Because it is really that important, and there’s a lot that small businesses may not be aware that can help them achieve their goals. And, unfortunately, ignoring the power of online-presence can actively hinder those same goals.

On a base level, most businesses use their Websites as the core of their business. It does a lot: acts as a business card, can help facilitate sales, builds reputation, exposes current and potential customers to new products or deals, even informs potential employees, etc.

The Data Is In

According to this 2024 article from FitSmallBusiness, their research confirms what many in the industry have already roughly estimated but deserves to be more widely understood:

• 98% of US consumers use the internet to discover or learn about local businesses.
• 80% of local searches end with a conversion (a customer buying something).
• 49% of consumers would prefer doing business with a local company.

Another article from Small Business Web from 2023 has an even more startling statistic. Were you aware that 80% of potential customers will engage with a company with a website? So clearly, the power of a local business having an online presence is a crucial part of today’s culture. However, many businesses have a “set it and forget it” mentality when it comes to their website as well as not using tools that can potentially help their operations. But there are other pitfalls of just ignoring the importance of a core website.

Are Social Media Profiles Enough?

Recently I was helping a friend of mine, who owns a General Contracting service, with moving a couch at his house. A few weeks earlier I referred his number to a potential customer but I could not find his website. “Well, I have [Social Media Profile 1] and [Social Media Profile 2]. We just don’t see a need for a website in addition to those,” He told me. I let him know that my referral didn’t call because they wanted to see examples of work. He paused, losing out to a fairly large project he didn’t know he had a chance on made him reconsider his online strategy. While you can measure conversion rates of potential customers you engage with, you absolutely lose 100% of the ones that can’t find your information reliably in the method of which they are comfortable.

Bringing It Together

I told you this story as illustrative of a big issue currently with some businesses in our local area: over-reliance on their Social Media profiles to drive their business. Social Media Profiles are often targets for hostile takeovers, and their “customer service” as it exists at all, is very lacking to solve the issue in a timely manner. Unless you have multiple avenues for reasserting your ownership of the page it may be lost forever. (As well, having a website can actually help greatly to regain access. A topic we’ll cover in a later post). Further, while Social Media profiles are crucial instruments to help build your brand lacking an attached website can greatly hurt your businesses perceived reputation with consumers and Search Engines alike.

Another mistake I’ve been seeing for local businesses is exactly the “set it and forget it” method of maintaining business websites I described early. This could be an issue of believing there’s no time to sit down and make substantial updates, a fear of “messing things up,” or just being unaware of the importance of regular updates all kneecaps the effectiveness of the entirety of online-presence success. In this post from Moneyzine it claims 25% of local businesses update their website either once a year or less. For better or worse, local business websites that evolve and change help drive customer acquisition and retention.

Finally, your website can give you an amazing set of tools that can help day-to-day operations or unlock potential you may not be aware of. We will have a full write up very soon on that very topic, excited for that.

Please contact us if you’d like an audit, new site, or online-presence road map. We can help your business with a plan that works for your business!