To Site or Not to Site

Trying to figure out whether or not you actually need your website to be a part of that growing list of promotional strategies?

Social media is a no-brainer for most business models now but that comes with a new workload and as that workload increases so does the overhead. It’s only natural to look for ways to contain that situation.

Sitting down to evaluate the promotional mix is generally when the website gets called into question:

Do we really need a website?

Does anybody use the site?

As one establishes the best social media properties to use, the website may start to appear like a tired anachronism.

That thing you got way back during the wild west of the web. Maybe it’s time to lose that.

It can be a compelling idea to eliminate that hassle and expense for many small businesses.

And social media is “free” and immediately connects a business with multiple demographics in ways that a website can’t.

Sounds like time to bale on that old thing, right?

Well, maybe not. Here are a few ideas to kick around:

Your website is probably the only element in your promotional mix that you own and control. For that reason alone, most businesses should keep a branded website as a part of their mix.

But there’s quite a bit more.

You can have a fully branded blog hosted on your own site, which can tie in very nicely with your social media.

You can design a very specific path for your site visitor to take that can’t be replicated elsewhere.

Your Tweets and Instagram posts can be powerful ways to build your brand but they will always be from a platform with its own brand to build.

Your posts at your own blog, housed at your own url, provide a singular branded experience that you fully control.

You can engage your site visitors in customized ways at your own site.

You can change your entire website layout and look to compliment a new rollout in ways that you can’t anywhere else.

Your site has search value that can increase your visibility footprint in unique ways at the major search engines.

Your site will provide a high level of detail about your visitors and the click paths they take.

Having your own site still says something good about the organization, unless the site is dated and not connected to any social media.

While the “brand value” of having your own site may be challenging to quantify, the business that it creates is not.

A simple, well-made site that is positioned well in search engines and designed to engage those searchers is invaluable to most business models.

But most businesses have not experienced that since there are only a handful of really valuable search positions and typically thousands of competitors trying to get found. For those businesses on the first page for key search terms, they know the power of that strategy and wouldn’t even think of giving it up.

If you are one of the big group who has a site that has never had a strong search presence then you are more likely to view the site as a thing with marginal value.

Reach out to us if your site is not getting targeted traffic from search engines and you are starting to question the value of keeping it. We can do a site assessment to let you know exactly where you stand, and more importantly, what stands to be gained with a positive change.