Digital Visibility Starts With a Website

No matter the industry, having and maintaining your own website is indispensable for service providers and retailers today. It is the only way to give your offer a genuine digital presence. The problem: many people still believe that building a website is complicated. Smaller companies often don't have the budget to hire professionals and end up doing nothing at all. That's a mistake – and an avoidable one. Below we take a closer look at why your own website matters so much and what it does for you.

No need to fear your own homepage

Before we talk about the benefits, it's important to know that anyone is able to present their company on a website. You don't need any programming skills. All it takes is a versatile website builder for creating high-quality content. With drag and drop, you can showcase images, text and much more online.

Tip: When choosing your domain, make sure it has recognition value. The domain name alone should make clear what the website is about. For a glove seller named Bernd Meyer, a name along the lines of "Gloves-Meyer" makes sense. If he only called himself "Meyer", no potential customer would know what to make of it.

The quality of your content is decisive

Once the framework of the website is in place, content becomes the deciding factor. It is written first and foremost for users, but also for Google, the most widely used search engine. Let's stick with the glove seller example. When a potential customer is looking for new gloves, that's exactly what they'll type into Google.

The search engine then decides which results to show in which position. Statistically, websites on the first page have far better chances of clicks and sales than those further back. With a clever SEO strategy (search engine optimisation), you can influence your own ranking. Instead of sitting somewhere on page ten, Gloves-Meyer can work his way to the front.

To do that, he needs above all meaningful content that offers readers real value. Packed with keywords and, more importantly, substance, Meyer helps his newly created website become visible. With animations, images and videos he increases the value of his content. And again, this requires no formal training – with programs like Adobe you can already achieve a great deal.

User-friendliness moves your website forward

Beyond questions of content, a good website is also about loading time and comfort. So-called page speed reveals how quickly the site loads on a smartphone or computer.

If it takes too long, the bounce rate of potential customers rises sharply. Anyone searching for a specific product or service today decides for or against a retailer or provider based on several criteria. The wrong font on the website, a poor submenu structure, weak readability and slow loading times all cause prospects to click away – even though they actually wanted to buy Meyer's gloves.

So we learn that the real magic isn't building a website. With a website builder that's done in no time. The real challenge is designing the website so that it resonates with Google and, above all, with potential customers.