Most companies treat marketing their business and building their website separately. Someone builds the website. Then, an agency, freelancer, or the business owner themselves at 11pm, tries to push people to the website. This causes budget to be lost. This is because the website is a big part of whether people turn into customers. Get the website wrong and the marketing has to work twice as hard to achieve half the results.
Why the website is part of “getting found”
Designing a website alone does not help get found. Search engines are not looking for the latest, prettiest website. Search engines care about page speed, mobile browser design, and a secure connection. Having a website that uses an old theme, is unoptimised, and misses basic website upkeep (correct page titles, working sitemap, secure connection) is fighting search engines that have one hand tied behind their back, no matter of how much content or link building is done.
This is important because getting found and having a website are not the same thing. People think SEO comes after the website is built. This isn’t true. Google’s trust in a page and how Google decides to display a page is greatly influenced by the way that page is constructed. An excellent content strategy can easily fail to perform as designed if the pages it is developed for take forever to load on mobile, because page speed and mobile usability are considered ranking factors, not nice-to-haves.
Why the website is part of “getting business”
Getting found is only half the challenge. Getting found is only useful if the design is done intentionally and with a clear goal in mind. When site visitors arrive from Google search, a Facebook ad, or a recommendation, they decide to stay on your page, do business with you, and trust your organisation within seconds. This is largely based on how the page looks and how easily the site visitor can do the one thing they are there to do, such as finding your location, checking a price, filling out a form, or booking an appointment.
There’s a parasitic relationship between design and marketing. Any latency, clutter, or obfuscation in the design directly affects the amount of visitors you pay to bring to your site that convert. If your marketing team brings 500 visitors to your site, and your design brings in a conversion rate of just 1%, you end up with 5 inquiries. If the design is no worse than before, marketing brings in 500 visitors again, but this time the design is focused, quick to load, and has forms that work; the conversion rate is up to 3%. You’ve gone from 5 leads to 15. The marketing cost remained unchanged. The return on that expenditure tripled because the constraint was never the number of visitors.
This balanced answer is important. A site with a fantastic design but does not consider search visibility is essentially an expensive brochure in a locked drawer. Because no one can find it, the design does not have an opportunity to convert any visitors. On the other hand, a site that ranks well or receives a good amount of paid traffic, but is slow, insecure, or confusing to use, will lose that traffic before it becomes a customer. Search engines recognise when a visitor quickly leaves a page, and that can negatively affect rankings. Technical issues, design, and marketing are not three lines on a receipt. They are the three pillars of a table, and a site with any issue of the three will lose customers. The loss of potential customers is the impact of any of the three pillars of a website being weak even if the other two are strong. Considering the three pillars of the website together, if a site ranks well and has excellent design, but matters for marketing the site is poor, then the site is a waste of potential income.
Getting started
For most local traders (such as shops) the best way to “get found” is Local Search. Local search results are the ones that come up when prospective clients search for a business or service near them. It is different from regular Search Engine Optimisation, and to rank locally you need to use different methods. It makes sense to study Local Search separately. We have another article that explains Local Search and what ranks businesses locally. If you are most interested in improving your business’s local ranking, that is where you should go next.