Who Really Needs A Website For Their Business?

In the day and age of social media, do you really need a website for your business? There are so many paths for people to take getting online that the choices begin to seem endless. You have Facebook pages, Facebook groups, Instagram accounts, Twitter accounts, and on and on. I’ve even seen small businesses use Etsy exclusively with decent results.

Will the plethora of social media options eventually kill the need for a traditional business website? Not hardly.

1. Build Something That You Actually Own

Businesses have assets that they own. They don’t depend on borrowed assets that could cripple their business if they are taken away suddenly. You don’t own anything that you post on Facebook, Twitter or any other site unless you actually own the domain. Social media trends change like the weather and we can’t control which one will be operating a week from now.

When you own the domain registration you can take your website to any server you wish. You can redesign and update it in order to cater to your target market. You can scale and adapt to your business needs rapidly. You are in the driver’s seat and owning your own web space is extremely valuable.

2. Build Domain Authority and A Solid Position On The Search Engines

As your brand grows you will produce more content and earn more backlinks over time. The quality of your content and backlinks help improve your domain authority. This domain authority is your “online reputation” and it is a strong signal that affects how your site is positioned on the search engine results pages. The age of your domain, the relevance of your content, the quality of your links and your on-site SEO all play a factor in determining your domain authority. You can’t build domain authority if you rely purely on social media sites and don’t control your own domain.

3. Brand Control and Reputation Management

If you are building a brand and you don’t register your domain and build a site, your competitors will. Why put all that effort into growing a business when someone else can acquire a domain with your company name, launch a site, get it ranked on the search engines and funnel all of your online traffic to them instead?

You also want to control what people are seeing when they search for your brand. Owning your own domain and publishing your own content help you control your online reputation.

In today’s competitive marketplace it is absolutely critical for a business to take their online marketing seriously. Every business should invest in their own domain, create a plan for launching a quality responsive website and create great content that their audience will love.