Hello everyone, my name is Dean Hawker. I am the owner of Conversion SEO and , I am doing a series of videos to address , common questions, complicated questions,  regarding businesses and their online presences. 

The question I want to address today is should your business be online?  From a marketers standpoint, especially an online marketer, you would think that the answer is always yes. But, the answer isn't always yes, sometimes there's businesses that maybe don't need to focus on their online presence. We work with companies, from enterprise level to solopreneur level , startups. , so this question is not as easy as it may seem,  but I want to go through a couple things you should consider when asking that question, just in general. Should my business be online?

First and foremost, I would ask what your goal is? Is your goal to be found. By other people when you tell them what you do and who you are? Or is your goal basically to attract , people that you haven't met before. That's the beauty of being online is you've got the ability to attract customers that you don't necessarily have to meet face to face. 

The second question I would ask is about your market. The keyword terms that you feel apply to your business, and who might be searching for them. The reason is because you want to take a look at what your keyword vole is. Believe it or not, there are some keywords and search terms out there that get very little vole. Now, it's not the biggest determining factor as to whether or not you should be online or not but it can help formulate a plan should your vole be very low.  Now, if you have no searchability at all, then you may not need to be online at all. Maybe you've got a very, either obscure or very specific niche that you're trying to cater to and there's just nobody searching for that online and your keyword volume is low, you may not need to have an online presence at that point.

The next question I would ask is, are you a brick and mortar business or are you an online only business? 

If you're a brick and mortar business and you rely on people coming through your door to use your products and services, then you probably need to have, at minimum like a local listing project done so if someone's searching for you on their laptop, on their phone,  at least your location comes up on a map somewhere. That would be the minim that I would suggest. 

If you're an online only business and you don't have a storefront, , or a door for people to walk in and out of to get your products and services,  and you do have keyword volume then I would say you do need to be online. You could go the referral route, which is a great element of marketing to put into your business but having online presence is a great complement to that as well.

One of the biggest questions is, do you have competitors? And are your competitors online? This question alone leads into a whole plethora of other topics and discussions that we would go through to try and really pinpoint your your marketing plan. But if your competitors are online,  and if you have a good solid amount of competitors online in your market, then I would say being online is not just something you should think about, it's probably pretty required.

If your competitors have a very strong presence, which can be measured, , then likely they are getting most of your competitors that are searching for your key terms so this is a big one and this does go into other questions that we'll address you know, in future videos but it's important.

Finally, is your market local versus national?  Do you have just a very small local market that you're trying to attract or are you , trying to sell something at a national level?  Whether it be products or services. If you're local only, you might be able to do just a local listing, again, if you're national and you really want to try to attract the right people,  you're probably not going to have a choice, you're going to have to have an online presence. 

Then, you know the next question that we actually address is the degree of presence that you want to have. , there is kind of a basic, what I would call electronic brochure presence, which is pretty much the information of your business card and maybe a little bit more. , this might be a webpage, it might be a franchisee page,  it doesn't have any internal links on your website,  but it's just enough to maybe give some credibility to your business and to yourself.  It's not uncommon for someone to get a business card from somebody and then hop online and see if they exist online or not, just from a credibility standpoint.

The other option of course is to have a full blown inbound marketable website. And what I mean by that is at this point this becomes a tool for you. , this is a website that has activity on it, it has certain elements that help you convert visitors into customers, and it's constantly growing. It's , you know, through various methods of either , content, additional pages, information, FAQs, there's a whole plethora of things that go into creating an inbound marketable website. 

But you know you have to ask yourself, you need to ask yourself do I want to just be a stagnant kind of, one stop, electronic brochure type of presence or do I want to have, you k now, a website that attracts the right customers for me, converts them into revenue?  That really is the ultimate goal of what we do ishelping you identify that market, attract that market, and then convert that market from a visitor into a revenue generating client or customer.

So it's kind of a quick overview,  there are other pieces that work into this but this is a good foundational place to start. When trying to decide exactly how aggressive or non-aggressive, if you will need to be online for your business to thrive. If you have questions and there's something that you would like us to answer, visit us as www.conversionseo.net. 

There's three things you can do there for free that'll help you out. ,you can download , a paper off the homepage,  that is the top five reasons why your website doesn't convert, so if you're having conversion issues now, download that paper, maybe it'll you know, give you some answers and some things to try. or you can get a free competitive analysis from us. , enter in your top two competitors and your URL into our form at the bottom of our homepage and we'll get back to you with a free analysis of where you stand in comparison to them and then if you've got questions, you can also go to the inbound tab at the top of our websites, scroll down to questions, submit your questions into a form,  We'll get that and then either write back to you if it's a really simple answer, or we might do maybe a video if it's a little bit more complex. 

So , please take advantage of one of those three things either you know, the downloadable paper the free competitor analysis, or get your question answered. We'd love to help out. Again, Dean at ConversionSEO.net and I look forward to speaking to you next time.