In January 2009 alone, Google reports that “Punta Gorda” was searched for 673,000 times and “Port Charlotte” was searched for 823,000 times. Our market research estimates that there are over 48,000 household computers in Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda combined (76.2 out of every 100 people in 2006 had a computer, according to the International Telecommunications Union). Pretty much all of the computers in the area are connected to the internet. That’s a huge market, and we’re hoping to show local businesses how they can reach them.

There’s no reason that any small business shouldn’t have a website. Even well-established businesses that don’t have products or services that they can sell online can benefit from having a website. As an example, musicians, artists, restaurants, and lawyers can all capture visitor information to tweak their marketing and make sales without relying purely on the customer to stop into their storefront or call them. A website provides your customers and leads a way to learn about you and to see why you’re better than your competition. Even if you have very few visitors to your website, having the URL on your physical promotional material will make you appear more credible and will let your customers contact you through yet another means. It’s a 24/7 form of advertising, and much cheaper than a newspaper ad or yellowpages advertisement.

Here’s a secret that most website designers don’t want you to know. Below is a checklist of the technical prerequisites you need before your website can go online:

• A hosting provider
• A domain name

That’s it! The domain name is an address such as harbordatasystems.com or google.com. Registration of a domain name (.com, .net, .org) is typically around $10 per year.

A web host is basically a computer that someone else manages which serves the PHP, HTML, and image files that your website displays. Hosting can range from $6 per month to $50 per month. When you register for hosting, 99.999% of hosting providers will also register your .com domain for free or a small yearly fee of around $10. Theoretically you could use your personal or business computer as an internet web host, but that probably goes against your internet service provider’s terms of service (they don’t like it when you resell their bandwidth).

Once you have your hosting, you can begin designing the content of your website. We will not go into the specifics of web database development, PHP programming, HTML and CSS markups, or PhotoShop (we went to college for this, there’s no way it can all be covered in a single post), but we will discuss some of the common practices implemented by successful online marketing campaigns.

Content is king on the web. Search engines such as Google and Bing cannot search the text in image files, videos, or Adobe Flash presentations. As a result, it is imperative that you include standard machine readable text in your web pages. Without this searchable text, search engines won’t be able to see if your content is relevant to the needs of a searcher. It’s still good to have images and flash if they make sense to your branding or offerings, but in most cases a minimalistic, clean, and intuitive layout doesn’t need bells and whistles.

Simplicity means accessibility, and accessibility means conversions. Turning a visitor into a paying customer is your website’s only goal. The Webby Awards, which is a group of over 750 web designers, experts, business figures and creative celebrities, nominate and award the best web designs and functional achievements every year since 1996.  If you take a look at the 2009 results (http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php) you’ll notice a trend of simplistic and fluid design, without the clutter and templated designs that most local web developers offer.  If you bombard your visitors with pictures of the family pets and your favorite funny pictures, you’re going to lose credibility. You wouldn’t include that information in print material, would you?

Networking is a broad term, but in this article we’re talking about links. While Google and Bing’s algorithms may be closely guarded, ever-evolving secrets, there are a few constants, and one of them is how many websites are talking about your website. Incoming links (called “backlinks”) are a major player for your search engine rankings.

If you frequent a website that is even remotely related to your business’s offerings, you should try to get a link from their website to yours. If the site you visit is a blog, you might mention your website in a comment. If you visit a newsgroup or forum, leave a link to your website in your signature. On Facebook and LinkedIn, keep your business profile public and join groups that are related to your service or products, or target markets.

Even better, find and join any low cost or free communities that can help your business, and get a listing on their website. The Chamber of Commerce, your church, Young Professionals/JV, SCORE, and many others will gladly include a link to your website if you just ask. As these sites are typically considered reputable resources, Google and Bing give their links a priority in search results. You should also seek out other websites, even competitors from different areas, and simply ask for a link to your site. You’d be surprised how many people will be willing to put your link on their site in exchange for a brief mention of theirs. Product and service review sites are also a great resource, such as Yelp.com and Google reviews. Newspaper and news sites are always looking for a story or press release, too. Even if they don’t publish it in print, they’ll more than likely publish it on their website. Make those contacts, and build your web presence!

Updates are critical for your website. Professional bloggers (people who write online articles for a living) write every day. For businesses that just want to promote their products and keep their existing customers aware, a little less often is OK. When Google and Bing index a site to their database they mark what time it was indexed. Both Google and Bing have been found to “throw the new guy a bone” and favor new content over historic content for their search result algorithms.

Advertising is a different game on the web. The three major paid advertising venues are Google, Bing, and Facebook. There are other free and paid resources available, and they will be mentioned in a later article (check back for updates!). The web lets you split-test marketing methods in a way that is nearly impossible (or at best, inaccurate) in traditional advertising methods. For example, you can create 2 different ad styles with different text and images, and directly see which ad is receiving more attention. You can then drop the slow-performing ad, and split-test more ads and tweaks to existing ads to get the best clickthrough rate.

Web advertising is also notoriously cheap. One reason is that you typically don’t pay for a listing, you pay for results. Wouldn’t it be nice if advertising in the Yellow Pages or newspapers you only had to pay whenever you got a call from the ad? For many ad placements, you might only have to pay $0.10-$0.70 per click from an interested visitor.

At the time this article was written, the search term “Port Charlotte” could give you an additional 224 visitors to your site per day and “Punta Gorda” could bring in 134, from paid advertising alone (which has been proven to often be less effective than organic search results). If you narrow your keyword list to be something more specific, such as “Plumber in Port Charlotte” you could reach more potential customers and keep your advertising budget small, as the hits you’d get from the advertisement would only be from people specifically searching for a plumber in Port Charlotte. Do the yellow pages or newspapers give you that many calls/walkins per day?

We’re by no means saying that you should drop offline advertising. In some cases offline advertising will work better than online advertising, and the success rate is sometimes much higher. For example paper flyers typically have a 2% conversion rate. With online advertising, you might see that closer to 0.2%-1.5% of the people who see your ad actually visit your site. 5000 flyers might cost you $850 for 100 calls (at a 2% success rate), but 100 clicks from interested searchers on a Google ad at $0.10-$0.70/click would cost $10-$70. The design and content those visitors see on your website and how well you capture their information will determine if they become a customer.

Today far more people are turning to the web to search for a business than to the Yellowpages or classifieds. You’re able to geographically target your market, and in some cases, as with Facebook, narrow down their 400 million users to a group of potential customers by age, location, interests, workplace, education, language, and marital status. You can customize your ads to be more interesting and relevant for each demographic. These web advertising platforms will then make sure that your ads only reach those groups of people, at or below the maximum cost per click that you choose, and within your daily budget. They help weed out the noise and send only interested customers to your website. Setting your maximum click price to $0.70 might still only charge you $0.15 per click, depending on the demand and competition for the keywords you choose. At this rate, if your daily budget is set to $10, you could potentially reach 67 highly targeted new local customers that day.

It’s not always possible to get a large amount of traffic, even from paid advertising with Google, Bing, and Facebook. Your ads have to be relevant to the visitors interests, there should be steady enough traffic for the keywords and demographics you specify, and they have to catch their eye. Most web surfers have trained themselves to look past and ignore advertisements. If yours sticks out in a non-offensive and attractive way, is relevant to their interests, and your site is clean and simple, you may get that click and gain a new customer.

Your competition has a website. Why don’t you?

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References:

1. http://www.entrepreneur.com/ebusiness/gettingstarted/article65204.html
2. http://technology.inc.com/internet/articles/200609/needawebsite.html
3. http://businessresources.legalzoom.com/why-you-need-a-website
4. http://www.promotionworld.com/internet/articles/06121410Website.html
5. http://www.morebusiness.com/advantages-to-create-website

The Google Keyword Traffic Estimator is just one resource for one search engine. You can try it out here: https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox to see how many estimated visitors you’d get per day from your planned Google advertising budget.