How to ensure your business is found online 24/7 by potential customers

Regardless of whether you have an established business or just starting up, you only really have two kinds of customers:

1. Those who know about you
2. Those who don’t

The first kind is so much easier to deal with in terms of marketing. If you capture their details in some way, you can market direct to them. If they come into your shop or premises, you can sell to them in person. You can send them special offers and loyalty schemes to keep them coming back for more.

Those who don’t know your business are far more tricky. You can certainly go out there and try to find them, but in this 24/7 always-connected world, you also need to make it as easy as possible for them to find you. That means putting yourself online is as many places as possible, and having your website as the central hub for your business.

The costs of new customers

Either approach has its own cost implications but, according to Forbes:
“Acquiring a new customer can cost five to seven times more than retaining an old one.” (1)
This is because most of your new potential new customers don’t know about your business – yet. When the need arises, they will do their research to find businesses that can solve their needs or problems. And for that research, they turn to the net – and increasingly, use their phone.

Going organic

According to search experts Ahrefs,
“68% of online experiences start with a search engine.” (2)
In other words, when most people go online, they start by using Google (93% of the time) and click on from there. No wonder that 53.3% of all the traffic coming to your website comes from organic search. (4)

Organic search is when you type in a phrase, such as “website designers near Bayfield” and are shown a whole bunch of results. The top “sponsored” links are paid-for ads, then there’s the map with locations on it, and then a list of websites. It’s this list of non-paid for, non-map results that are the organic search results.

In terms of our two kinds of customers, these organic results are just what your potential new customers want. They usually don’t know your business exists, let alone its name, website address or telephone number. They just need a website designer. The search results gives them options to choose from.

And, of course, to find out more, they just touch on the link and in micro-seconds they are on the website. (Well, hopefully microseconds – more on this a bit later.)

Looking good

Once that potential new customer clicks the link and comes to your website, you need the best possible website page to show them why they should do business with *you*. It needs to look great on whatever device they view it on – smart phone, tablet, laptop, desktop – but especially on their phone.

According to Statista,
“58.99% of all website traffic worldwide comes from mobile phones.” (3)
Note, *website* traffic. Almost 60% of your potential new customers are looking at your website on a screen no wider than your handspan. Indeed, CNBC estimates that almost 73% of people who access the web worldwide by 2025 will *only* use a smartphone. (6)

So, if you want to know what your website looks like, grab your phone and have a look. Chances are if your website is over five years old or you’ve made a lot of changes yourself, the results may be somewhat disappointing. This isn’t necessarily because your website isn’t well designed or informative. It’s that your potential customer’s expectations have changed regarding ease of use, design, and they are far more impatient than they used to be with tech!

Social media pages and accounts

There are businesses who only promote themselves online via a Facebook page or an Instagram account, and in some cases just a YouTube channel, and do OK. However, by limiting themselves to just social media users, these businesses are cutting out whole swathes of customers who don’t use the platforms for search.

What’s more, these social platforms are private businesses, and they can (and do) set and change their rules at will. (See the recent example of Elon Musk and X, formally known as Twitter.) One change of direction, and you could lose your entire web presence, or potentially have to pay large amounts for it in the future.

That’s why at Akira all our websites are ‘independent’. We build them using the very latest WordPress software which is open-source, meaning nobody owns it. We host them with specialist hosting companies, who offer high levels of security and almost zero downtime. So it doesn’t matter what happens at any individual social media platforms, your Akira website is always there to be found by new customers searching online anytime of the day and night, across the world.

Gone in 60 microseconds

We all know that how fast the internet is on your phone largely depends where you are at the time. However, we also know just annoying it is when a website loads slowly. If it takes too long, we’ll just click another link.

OK, we might wait a little more than 60 microseconds, but that’s why a website needs to be optimized to deal with this need for speed. If you’ve added more information, images or other items such as videos to an older website yourself, this can seriously slow down that load speed.

At Akira, one of our passions is making websites that look great and load fast, really fast. In fact, we have our own coding expert Paulius who specialises in doing just this, turning Tony’s slick and contemporary website designs into turbo-charged sites that load quickly and work exceptionally well.

SEO and search results

For your potential new customer, all that fast loading should whizz them to the relevant content on your website that tells them that your business can solve their problem. And that’s not necessarily your home page.

If you searched for “washing machines on sale near me” and you got the home page for every electrical store in your area listing *everything* they sell, not their page on washing machines, you would not be impressed.

It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, whether goods, products, or services. new customers need to be taken to the right page on your website that solves their problem. Anything else is a waste of their time.

This is where onsite SEO comes into play. It basically makes sure each page is properly “labelled” for search engines, and that the content on each page contains the phrases those potential new customers are using to search for products and services just like yours.

The more detail there is, the better. Just saying “We sell all major brands of washing machines” and having lots of images simply won’t cut it any more. You need well-written, quality, informative content – and lots of it.

The resulting “SEO leads” (people who found you due to your SEO work) have an incredible close rate of 14.6% (5), because basically they are pre-sold. If they can buy online at your website too, even better. (More on websites and e-commerce in a future blog.)

Get found with Akira Studio

If you want your new business to be found online, or your current website is not up to scratch, give us a call. We design websites for all kinds and scales of businesses, from local tradespeople and celebrities to our Ontario municipalities, plus UK and international companies.

We’re straightforward to deal with, so we won’t try and upsell loads of features you don’t need. Neither will we promise the earth in terms of mega results and deliver much less. We’re realistic, reliable and honest, and the person you talk to on the phone about your website is the person who will design your website.

As an independent Ontario web design company, we have a small and highly experienced international team with members based in Canada, Europe and South America. Together, we have built over 450 websites, so we know what works. To discuss your requirements: