Marketing and SEO

There are a lot of small businesses out there that are doing quite well without a website. After all what does landscaping or lawn mowing have to do with technology? “Word of mouth is our best advertising!” is the mantra that is chanted when someone suggests getting a website, and they are absolutely correct.  I’ve always been one of the first to agree that “word of mouth” is undoubtedly your best advertising no matter what your business…HOWEVER …what’s the first thing you do when a friend refers a business to you?  You probably say, “Can you send me a link?” or “Do they have a website?” And then out comes the smart phone or the tablet and you’re off to validate whether or not this business is potentially going to deliver what you need. For this kind of validation your website does not have to be expensive, or rank high on the search engines.  While it never hurts to have great SEO, your site can place dead last in the SEO ranking and it will still come up when someone types in your domain link, or quite possibly even just your business name, and just having that simple one page site with a few nice images and some creative content describing your business will go a long way toward making the difference between a word of mouth recommendation turning into a client, or passing you by for the business down the street.