Entrepreneurs across the world now need to embrace the power of the Internet to grow their small and medium businesses into robust ones. A small business website should be a part of the overall business plan and the entrepreneur should leverage the reach and visibility that it offers.

Unfortunately, when I look around myself, many startups, small and medium businesses have not yet realized this. They continue to rely on the brick and mortar model to run their business and shy away from online marketing.

Fortunately, Over the last few years, the number of users of the Internet across the globe has gone up significantly. It is very heartening to note that this growth is not limited to developed countries alone. Smaller and developing countries have also started to use the Internet and as per recent reports, almost 42% of the global population are active Internet users.

Entrepreneurs now need to make a change in their mindset to take advantage of this explosive growth of the Internet-using population wholeheartedly. Their hesitation and sometimes reluctance arises from a lack of knowledge about how easy it is to go online today.

The myths about building business websites

Myth 1: Small Business Websites are expensive

Due to a lack of awareness about the cost of building and maintaining a website, they tend to believe that it is on the higher side. Thus, they feel that they don’t have the adequate monetary resources to go online.

Truth: Building small business websites is not a costly affair at all

A basic business website is well within the budgets of most small and medium businesses. While a barebones business website built at a reasonable cost might not give them all the bells and whistles, but it can certainly give them visibility. They can hire a website developer to build them a business website at a reasonable cost.

Myth 2: To keep up a business website they need strong technical knowledge

Not every business owner is tech-savvy. Thus, they feel that they are not adequately prepared to adapt to this new way of doing business. Also, maintaining the website will take up a lot of their time

Truth: They need not be tech savvy

The entrepreneur can delegate the responsibility of maintenance of his business website to any other employee in his organisation, or the website developer himself. It is not expected that every entrepreneur will have sound technical knowledge. But that should not stop him from embracing technology as a business catalyst.

Myth 3: New websites cannot get good search rankings

A new small business website does not stand a chance to get a higher ranking on search engines like Google and Bing, as compared to the websites of my well-established competitors

Truth: Vintage does not guarantee ranking

The Internet provides a level playing field to everyone. There are several instances where smaller but well-designed websites providing a great user experience have ranked higher than larger and older websites. The key to getting a higher ranking is to have a carefully designed and developed website which conforms to the search engine guidelines. The size or vintage of the website alone never guarantees a higher ranking.

Hopefully, we have been able to clear some misconceptions through this article. So, overcome your hesitation and start to think about building a small business website.

While today you might be happy with the business that you are getting from the physical stores that you own, tomorrow your website might become your biggest source of customers throughout the year. Talk to us to see how we can help you in this journey.