I’ve been pondering this question for the last couple of weeks. Us humans are natural storytellers: it’s largely how we communicate with each other. Plus, stories are sticky… we remember them long after the boring ol’ facts and figures have faded from our brains.

My ponderings all began with contact lenses. My husband and I get our contact lenses from a local optometrist. Every three months, like clockwork, they send us our lenses for the next three month period.

Usually.

See, this particular time, the person responsible for paying the optometrists’ account with the lens suppliers went on summer holiday. Said bill went unpaid. And, as a result, my husband’s lenses didn’t arrive.

The optometrist screwed up.

But we aren’t telling that story.

Yes, they messed up. It was inconvenient. But, whenever we tell anyone a story about these optometrists, we don’t dwell on this. It was a minor glitch.

Instead, we’re telling the story of Sheila, the receptionist, who after only meeting us once at our initial consultations, remembers our names and faces and prescriptions; who is always incredibly on the ball; and who on this occasion went out of her way to sort out the problem for us. We’re telling the story of how the optometrist provides really great service, sorts things out quickly when they do go wrong, and takes care of us and our eyes in a way that makes us feel like a million bucks even though we’re paying a third of what our previous Edinburgh-based optometrist (who never remembered who we were) used to charge.

What stories do you want people to tell about your business?

You can tell your own stories about your own business until you’re blue in the face. That’s marketing. If you take all the marketing material in the world at face value, every business out there is wonderful. According to themselves.

And people do buy on the basis of fancy schmancy marketing. No doubt about it. But people are also swayed, immensely so, by the informal stories that flow through the grapevine about you and your business.

These stories tell the truth about your business.

These stories can make you. Or they can break you.

What stories are people telling about your business?

Yes? Then, let me guess – you don’t have a website, right? Right.

Nope, I’m not psychic. Just playing the odds: two-thirds of small local businesses have no web presence.

Which leads us to the million dollar question: so what?

The World Wide Web is just that… world wide. Your business, on the other hand, serves clients in one geographical location. So what value does a website have for you?

The answer: a lot. It is the million dollar question, after all!

Your business needs to be where your clients are.

And your clients are in your local area. Correct, but not the end of the story.

Because your clients are also online.

Most of them have replaced the dead tree version of the Yellow Pages with Google. Even when they want to find a business operating in their local area, it’s quicker and easier to use an online search than to consult a big ol’ clunky book.

When we moved into a new area not so long ago, for example, I needed to find quite a few local businesses ranging from a new hairdresser to someone who could remodel our kitchen. As many people do, I turned to the Internet to search for those services.

Roughly 40% of search engine queries are now focused on local businesses. And, even more importantly, over 90% of those searches end up converting into offline sales.

The bottom line: if you’re one of the two-thirds of small local businesses without a website, you’re losing business to the third that do have a web presence. Phrased differently: a website can help you to dominate your geographical niche.

And the reasons why are a bit more complex than just getting your business name in front of your potential customers’ eyes.

How a website can help your small local business:

Convenience

Recently, I wanted to purchase a gift for someone from a store in a neighbouring town. I had been to the store before, but couldn’t remember their name, so I couldn’t look up their telephone number in the directory. I wanted to check their opening hours and whether or not they had the item in stock before I made the trip.

To find the information, I searched online for keywords relating to the type of shop and the town in which it was located – to no avail, unfortunately. As it turned out, the shop didn’t have a website.

Covering basic information like contact details and opening hours is extremely convenient for clients wanting to do business with you. It means that they don’t waste time visiting your store at 9am, for example, on a day when you only open at 10am!

Supplying these details is the first step in making it easy for clients to do business with you. And it provides a foundation for establishing you as trustworthy and credible.

Trust and credibility

There’s no way for a client to glean how trustworthy you are from a Yellow Pages ad, nor any way for them to know whether you’ll be reliable just by looking at a simple directory listing of your name and telephone number.

But a website provides a space in which you can demonstrate your expertise and develop a stronger relationship with potential clients. It allows you to pre-sell them on your services, and to screen out clients who may not be a good fit for what you do.

A local therapist, for example, was finding that she was spending a great deal of time meeting with first-time clients whose problems didn’t really fall under her expertise or who could be better served by a different therapeutic style. By setting up a website in which she explained her areas of counselling focus and her therapeutic approach clearly, she was able to essentially pre-screen her clients and attract only those who could most benefit from her services.

When I was searching for various tradespeople to remodel our kitchen, I was drawn to those companies or sole traders who had websites that explained their services and provided photographic examples of their previous work along with testimonials from previous clients. It went a long way towards building trust.

Attract new customers

A well-designed website containing well-written content that pays attention to important keywords in your niche can attract organic search engine traffic to your site and hence your business.

The great part about this organic traffic… it’s free.

Yup, you don’t pay for it. It’s traffic that the search engines naturally send your way. Having a website can attract new customers to your business while reducing your advertising spend.

Maintain relationships with existing clients

Your website can help keep you at the forefront of existing clients’ minds. They may return to your site (and thus your business) if they know that it provides information that is both interesting and useful to them. A landscaping company, for example, could provide some articles on gardening tips or easy things that clients can do themselves to maintain their landscaped garden.

You can also draw people back to your website and your business by offering Internet specials, or seasonal offers that people can redeem on the site or in person.

Add new income streams to your business

While a website can still add tremendous value to your business in the local sense, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t also take advantage of some of those benefits of having a global audience.

As an example, let’s consider the landscaping company I mentioned above. Physically, they can only landscape gardens in their geographical area. But, they could do some of the following to obtain some extra passive income:

• Sell an ebook online that focuses on a topic related to gardening or plants
• Monetise the articles on their site by means of Google AdSense or another advertising model
• Add an online store to their website where they sell items like gardening tools

Every business, regardless of niche, will have options in this regard.

Ready to get an online presence for your small business?

So, a website can help your business, even if it’s small and local. But where do you start?

We’re glad you asked! You can start by contacting us. We’re technically a small local business too, but thanks to the magic of the Internet, we can work with you to create an online presence regardless of where you are in the world.