How Websites Play a Significant Role in Local Search Marketing

It’s quite fascinating to see how things have substantially changed over the past few decades, and how the internet bubble burst and altered every aspect of the contemporary world.

Internet, when combined with computers, gained considerable momentum and contributed towards our digital growth.

With the unprecedented growth of internet, a sizable chunk of businesses went operational with websites. And then came social media.

With the advent of social media, more and more small and medium businesses started choosing social media platforms as their operational face, discarding their website as they progressed. Fall 2016 Small Business Barometer Survey, a survey by Capital One suggested how only 56% of small businesses have a website. Out of those, only 53% were optimized for mobile phones and less than 30% of companies had a mobile-optimized website.

Seemingly enough, there are reasons persuading businesses to believe that third-party social platforms are ideal alternatives to websites. As a result, websites are struggling for relevance and are having a hard right competing with many social media platforms.

This being said, discarding websites for fancier social platforms isn’t the right choice, however good an idea it may seem to be.

A website alone offers multiple marketing strategies that help you grow your business. It’s fair that you know where your customers are and you plan on directing your efforts towards that platform. But what if your customers don’t know where you belong, where does your credibility go?

You social media page is not insured against fatal threats either. It can be hacked, marked as inappropriate, is prone to social networking worms, Trojans, date leaks, and Cross-Site Request Forgery, all of which can lead to discontinuation by the third-party owners.

Now with your social media page gone, you are lost in vast realm of digital world, with no backup website to your rescue. What do you do now?

Mentioned below are some more reasons as to why businesses need an operational website, even more so for local search marketing.

1. More than 60% of users engage with brands using their websites

As such, only two forms of media are used by customers when looking for local businesses: Brand websites and search engines. I’m pretty sure you never went looking for a business on your Facebook profile, right?

Digital Consumer Study, a report by Local Search Association portrayed how despite the growth of different social media platforms, the use and value of websites have increased.

2. Most of the organic factors affecting SEO are website related

SEO, as we all know, is a big deal. It’s estimated that only about 5% of on digital customers have never used a search engine to look for a local business.

10 of the top organic factors affecting a search engine ranking are either related to the website or its domain. These factors determine the authority your brand holds in your niche and the quality of your website.

Also, since Google clearly doesn’t consider social signals while weighting influence, it becomes difficult to achieve such factors on a social media platform.

Moreover, digital marketing’s foremost goal is to find prospective customers, and a firm simply cannot count on its existing customers. Therefore, appearing naturally on the search engines for certain keywords become all the more important.

3. A lot many customers do not consider engaging with a business lacking a distinct website

And honestly, they are not the one to be blamed.

A Facebook page and an Instagram handle are all okay, but customers generally rely on multiple information sources, the lack of which simply indicates the business’s lack of credibility.

As much as 30% of digital consumers immediately strike a business off their consideration as and when they find that the brand doesn’t have a website.

From where I sit and write, you’re simply losing potential customers who could have helped you scale your revenue.

Everything till this point must have made it evidently clear to you that your business is taking a huge incision, just because you’ve chosen to limit your business’s scope and access. A website is the most convincing medium capable of transmitting your information seamlessly over the internet.

It’s important that you understand that this post was not intended to bash social media as an instrument to propagate your reach and revenue. However, it’s equally important to understand where its scope ends and the how a website inculcates value and credibility in a brand.

• Published on
• 05/06/2017
• By
• Brands Martini


• Categories: Local Search Marketing