Websites are no longer a luxury item; they’re a necessity.
According to Moz, there are approximately 7 billion unique local searches per month on Google in the U.S. alone. It’s no wonder businesses that are online grow 40% faster than those that aren’t.
Google found that 92% of smartphone owners in the U.S. seek local (offline) information via their mobile devices, and that 89% of those people took some form of action after such a lookup. Beyond this Google said that 25% of people in the U.S. made a purchase after a local lookup. In addition, in the U.S., 51% called a business, and 48% actually went to the business location.
Local searchers are ready to act. Many visit a nearby location within a day and complete purchases at a higher rate than consumers, who conduct non-local searches.
In other words, capturing the local search market means first dibs for consumers who are in the final stages of the buying cycle, wallets out, ready to buy. Try enticing these consumers to spend money in your store through the use of mobile coupon campaigns.
Websites can also bury bad reviews.
Eighty-eight percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. If a business has a bad review(s), having a website with pages (or links) means more chances to bury the link to the second page of Google.
Consumers use search engines to find local businesses. They expect you to have a website today, and they want information immediately.
Fifty-four percent of people search on their smartphones for business hours. Fifty-three percent search for directions to a local store. And 50 percent search for local store addresses.
Think about all the prospects you could be missing out on who are searching for exactly what you do or provide better than anyone else online and off.
Why WordPress?
In 2016, content management systems (CMS) like WordPress have made creating (and managing) a website accessible to everyone. It’s extremely beginner friendly.
“If you know how to use Microsoft Word, you already know how add your own content. WordPress can be expanded with free plugins to handle just about any site you can imagine – from gorgeous business pages to social networking sites. With “plugins” you’ll be able to add contact forms, subscription forms, image galleries and so on for your website – pretty simple, huh?”
“To put simply, a content management system (or website building platform) is a user-friendly platform for building websites and managing your own online content, instead of using a bunch of loose HTML pages.”
Drupal and Joomla are two examples of CMS, but they’re much harder to use, and there’s a lot less talent and support for these platforms.
WordPress is simply the best choice. It’s certainly the easiest platform I’ve ever used (and that’s coming from a non-coder). In fact, WordPress is the most popular CMS today.
As of February 2016, WordPress was used by 59.1% of all the websites whose CMS we know. This is 25.8% of all websites. And as of January 2015, more than 23.3% of the top 10 million websites on the Internet use WordPress.
Mashable, TechCrunch and New York Times all use WordPress.
WordPress is also customizable.
While you may not adding a lot of features at this stage, you may need and/or want to in the future, which is another reason why I love WordPress.
There’s massive support for WordPress.
Because WordPress is massively popular, it has significantly more plugins, themes and talent readily available to help you if you get stuck on something.
Seriously, just join a Slack group with technical people, and anyone will be able to help you.
“There’s a HUGE support community. WordPress isn’t just a software, it has become a community. Some might even say a movement. In fact, WordCamps (1-3 day training sessions) have sprung up from grassroots efforts. They are informal, community-organized events put together by other WordPress users just like you. You’ll meet people of all backgrounds, ages, and nationalities at WordCamps. Plus, there are thousands of people and hundreds of resource and tutorial sites set up just to help you with your WordPress site.”
Last, and certainly not least, WordPress is SEO-friendly, which means that Google LOVE WordPress because Google, love sites that are easy to index, and WordPress is super easy to index.