Do I Need a Website for my Business?

Do I need a website for my business? This question is one of the most commonly asked questions in entrepreneur groups. I see many answers; some say yes, while others say no. I am 100% in the yes category. In today’s world, you need a website to be taken seriously in business. 

A Website Makes You Look Professional

Customers will try to find you online. If they can’t find you, they may find a competitor, and you lose your chance at earning their business. A website is a minimum requirement for a local or online store today. 

What if I Build my Business on Facebook or Instagram Instead? 

Building your business on a social media channel is a BAD idea for many reasons. The most important reason is that you don’t control the channel. It’s someone else’s, and you’re borrowing their audience. Due to this, you have to play by their rules, and we all know that social media algorithm updates can (and do) frequently impact business pages. Building your business on a social media channel is like building your home on someone else’s land. You wouldn't do that, right? Why would you build your business on rented ground, then? 

Building a Website is too Hard.

I hear this over and over, and I get it. Creating a website is time-consuming and difficult, but there are so many easy-to-use website builders today that this shouldn’t be a limitation. Start with a website builder and go from there. You can always upgrade later on. Your first website isn’t going to be your last or your best. It will be your first website and help get the job done. 

 Listen to the podcast here.

I Don’t Know What to Include on a Website

Your first website can be straightforward. You should have a homepage that tells potential customers how you can help them. You want to address their needs and issues right away and show how you solve their problems. 

Having a contact page makes it easy for potential customers to find out how to get in touch with you. If it makes sense in your industry, have a company or about page. If you sell products online, you’ll have a product page. If you want to blog, set up a blog page, too. 

You may have a few different pages, but the simple website can be just a few pages and still provide value to your customers and help build your business. 

Does my URL or Email Address Matter? 

Register your website domain (URL) and set up a business email address. Don’t use your business name at Gmail or Yahoo! Or whatever; it doesn’t look as professional as having an email address set up as name@businessurl.com. Spend $5 a month with Google Suite and set it up, or have it set up through your website hosting company. 

Establish your website domain, too. Don’t do something like mybusiness.wordpress.com; go ahead and set it up the right way from the beginning and have mybusiness.com as your website address. 

Add a Little SEO to get Traffic.

If you’re going to build your website, register your domain name, set up your email address, and do everything else associated with setting up a professional business, then you need to complete the process and work on some SEO for your new site.

You don’t have to do everything today, but add Title Tags and Meta Descriptions for each page. Don’t use the default ones from Yoast SEO (if you’re on Wordpress), or even worse, leave them blank. This post highlights some basic SEO you can do when first starting out. 

Make the Right Impression on your Potential Customers

Setting up a professional-looking website with a professional email address helps your business look more legitimate to potential customers. Spend a little time and complete the process to grow your business. You don’t want your lack of a website to cause a potential customer to find the competition instead, which would be bad for business. 

Podcast Episode Transcript

Hi, welcome back to the Simple SEO Content Podcast. This is one of our business owner entrepreneur episodes. I am your host, Rachel Lindteigen. I'm so glad that you're here with me today. Today, I want to talk about websites. Does your business need a website and if so, what content do you need to have on it? Spoiler alert: yes, you need a website for your business.

If you are just starting out and you're trying to run your business off a Facebook page or an Instagram profile, I recommend that you build out a website. It can be super simple in the very beginning. It does not have to be fancy, but I would recommend that you build out a website. There are a couple of reasons for this. First off, having your own website is going to make you seem more legitimate and more credible as a business owner. If you're trying to drive traffic to your business and you're sending people to your Facebook page or your Instagram profile, you don't seem as legitimate as someone who has a website or a more established business.

The next issue with trying to build your business on Facebook or Instagram is that there are a couple of issues. One is the percentage of people who follow you and see your content on social media channels is minuscule. You'll be lucky if three to five percent of your followers see your content. So trying to build a business where only 3% of the people who've signed up, who've said, "Hey, I like this business, I want to hear from them," are going to see what you're posting is not going to help you grow your business. So, not only does it not seem super professional, but nobody's going to see it. The people who sign up, 97 out of 100 of them, aren't going to see what you're posting because of the way that social media algorithms work. 

The other thing is your social media lifespan is seconds to minutes, maybe a day or two. You're not going to have people finding information from you further down the road because they're not going to see the post. If they saw it on the first day, like 3% are going to see it, and by the 48-hour mark, they're not going to show it to anyone else. So your audience, your chance of an audience finding you and truly building your business on social media, is teeny tiny. The other thing that I want you to think about is that social media is a rented space. So not only do you have such a small percentage of people who are even going to see you, but you have this super limited lifespan. You're also at the mercy of the social media channels. Their algorithms change regularly. 

I mean, let's think about it for a second. This time last year, everybody was doing Reels because the only way to get any visibility on Instagram was to do Reels. They've said, "Oh, we did too much with Reels; now we're doing regular posts, and we want you to do carousel posts too." You guys, you're at their mercy. If you do this on Google, you're building your own website. You own your website. You own your client interaction. You own the messaging. Anyone who comes to your website is able to find the information that they're looking for as long as you have it there. And we're going to talk about that next. 

What information do you need to have on your website? You don't have to have some big, huge website, okay, my friend. You can start with a small one. You can build it yourself. You don't have to spend thousands of dollars to have somebody build a website for you. I'm not going to advocate that.

In the very beginning, you should do your own website. Keep your costs down; make it as simple as possible. I want you to do some SEO on it. You're probably not surprised by that. So, I don't want you to use the GoDaddy website builder because, to my knowledge, unless it's changed, you cannot add title tags, meta descriptions, and basic SEO to the GoDaddy website builder. However, you can on most of the other ones. So I want you to make sure that you have a website. Super basic is fine.

Use WordPress, Wix, Showit, Squarespace, whoever you want, whatever you're comfortable with, okay? The content that you want on there. I know sometimes it's kind of cool to do the one long page, the infinite scroll where you see everything in one. I don't want you to do that, okay, because Google doesn't understand when you put everything in one. You need to have separate pages, and you need to optimize each of those pages for Google. So your very basic website, you need a home page. What is your business called? Who does your business help? Where are you located?

Give me a high-level overview of your business. You need to have a services or products page. How does your business make money? You need to be able to connect with people who come to your website to help them understand how you help them. So these are my products, these are my services. Here's how I can help you. You need to have a way for them to contact you, so you probably are going to have a contact page. Maybe you'll have a contact form on there, maybe you'll have a phone number, maybe you'll have a link to an email. Whatever it is, give them a way to find you. The last page that I recommend you have, even in the very beginning, is an About page.

Help your new potential customers understand who you are and what your business is about so that they know they can trust you. Are you someone who can help them? Are you familiar with their niche? Do you know the type of questions that they have? What background and experience do you have? You can have a very simple website and build a successful business. It does not have to have all the bells and whistles. It does not have to have all the craziness. You can have a very simple site with about four pages: Home, Products or Services, About, and a way for them to contact you. That's all you have to have in the very beginning. I don't want you trying to build your business on a Facebook page, on an Instagram profile or just on TikTok. I want you to have something that you own so that you're not at the mercy of those algorithms. 

With the social media channels, yes, Google has an algorithm 100%. However, the changes to the Google algorithm are minimal in comparison to the changes that we see from a social media standpoint.

Google has been focused on the same things for about 15 years now. Google is focused on great quality content that provides value and is helpful to the reader and the authority of the website. Every update that we get from Google boils down to one of those two things. It's about the content itself, how quality it is, how much it is, if it's good, if it's AI-generated, if it's off-shored, whatever it is, and the authority. The authority generally amounts to the links. How authoritative does Google see your website as being? How many people are linking to you? All of that, that's the core of every Google update in the last 15 years: content or authority. Content or links are the two most important factors when it comes to SEO.

Now, you're going to create a base website. It does not have to be fancy, it does not have to be big, it does not have to have a ton of content to start, but I want you to create that base core website and then I want you to optimize it. I want you to learn SEO and do SEO so that people searching Google can find your website. Because if you don't do SEO, you're seldom going to show up for anything other than your name, and sometimes you won't even show up at the top of the list for your name. Your social media profiles will show up instead because they are considered to be more authoritative than a website that's brand new, that's small, that's not optimized, and all of that. So, make sure you're learning how to optimize your website as well.

So, if you haven't yet, take the free SEO class, get the Beginner's SEO Guide, and then, when you're ready, join me in Simple SEO Content so I can walk you through all of this and help you figure out what content to add, when you're ready to blog, and how to get more traffic coming to your website. But for now, promise me you're not going to try to build your business on a social media channel. You're going to build it on your own website, and then we'll work on adding an email list to it so that you can start to build that email list that you own in addition to your social media following. All right, that's it for today. Thank you so much for being here. I'll see you next week.