I hope you don’t have to ask the question, “Why does my business need to be on the internet?” If you sincerely don’t know why it is important to have an internet presence, I’ll ask you to do an easy experiment. Ask ten to twenty people, from different age groups, how often they use the yellow pages to find a business versus how often they use the internet. For those that say they use the internet, ask where do they look. I think you will find that the majority use the internet much more and nearly all of those use Google to try to find the information they are seeking. Yet if you look in the yellow pages you will still find many, many businesses that are spending hundreds a month, if not thousands to try to attract new customers.
So, hopefully, now you know why you need to have your business on the internet. But how do you go about getting your business there. Most likely if you are not on the internet, you don’t know how to do it yourself. Before you try to hire someone to build a web site and get you on the internet, you need to ask them a few questions. Of course you will want to see some examples of their work. A warning here, a pretty web site is not always the best one. More importantly than what their web sites look like, ask them to show you where they are on the internet. I don’t mean just type in the URL (your internet address). Ask how does the web site rank for their main keyword. If they don’t know what you mean, you don’t want to hire them. This is getting into SEO, search engine optimization. This is more important than what the web site looks like.
You need your site to rank on the first page of Google for your main keywords. Your main keywords will be a group of words that you think a prospective customer would type into Google to find a business like yours. If you were a painting contractor in Memphis, it might be something like “painting contractor Memphis” or “Memphis painting contractor.” Yes, these are different keyword phrases and you might want to try to rank for both. Before I go any further, a person can’t guarantee that you will rank on first page of Google. The more competitive your keyword phrase is the harder it is to rank. For example, “LA injury lawyer” is nearly impossible to rank on the first page of Google. On the other hand I was able to get my antique mall in Dallas to have four listings on page one of Google for my main keyword phrase. So you want to make sure whoever is doing your site knows SEO and can get your web site seen by the people looking for a business or service like yours.