It’s indisputable that any small business needs a website in 2017. After all, more than 3.5 billion people currently use the internet, and your website acts as a digital business card that’s open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you want to be visible where your potential clients are spending their time, having a website is a no-brainer.
Mobile Search and Client Growth
Did you know that 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation? Or that 74% say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more?
Why Do I Need a Website?
If you run a practice or small business and you don’t have a website yet, you’re not alone. In fact, a recent study showed that about 46 percent of small businesses (those with less than 10 employees) don’t have a website for their company. If you own one of these small businesses, you’re missing out on an invaluable tool for growing and retaining a client base.
Submitting to Directory Listings
Our free Directory Listings service helps promote our members’ businesses by submitting key information to our Directory Database, which is used by over 100 online directories to create listings.
Instead of having to research which business directories are out there, and then figuring out the specific submission requirements for each one, we do most of the work for you. Not only do you save time, but you benefit from teams of experts who specialize in researching and networking with directories, listings, and local search best practices. All you have to do is fill out one simple form in our editor and we’ll take it from there. If your business happens already to be listed on these directories, connection with our directory helps the Directories stay detailed and updated.
Promoting Your Address, Even If You Don’t Think You Should
Most of our members have a physical location that clients/customers/patients come to. For such businesses, promotion works more or less the same whether they are running a Dentist office, Animal Hospital, Haberdashery or donut shop; as long as you say who you are, what you do and where you are, people can figure out how to come to you.
If you don’t have a physical office you wish to publicize, it’s extra important to clarify how your business works. If people don’t come to you, how DO they interact with you? Remember, you want it to be as easy as possible for clients to contact and do business with you, so make sure that no guesswork is involved with the process.
This Above All, to Thine Own Self Be True”
– Shakespeare
CoachingWebsites provides you with a website straight out of the box. This includes a clean and easy to use design, forms (and option to replace those with your own), maps, and even pre-written pages for all the content we’ve found vital for CoachingWebsites practitioners. This content is deliberately written to the average of the average, made to broadly cover the scope of a CoachingWebsites practice. And while it’s a great start, it is no substitute for content that is tailored to exactly where you are and what you do!
Beware The All You Can Buy Domain Buffet
When you sign up for a domain or start researching your domain, one thing becomes quickly clear; your domain name matters and having a keyword in your domain is often an aspect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Just to define the term, a keyword can be considered any search word (or phrase) people will type into a search engine that you want to be a result for.
The role of a keyword in a domain is easy to overstate. That is, unless you’re contending for a word that doesn’t have a lot of competition, your use of a keyword in the domain is a single mote of sunshine streaming into a greenhouse — easily lost and having almost no noticeable impact.
How to Deal With A Bad Review
Some unpleasant things, like death and taxes, are certain. Others are less certain, but still more common than we’d like. One of these are bad reviews.
In my 20’s, I wrote for a few independent music magazines, and often reviewed albums. One decision I made early on was to not give a bad review of any young band. I figured that if they were bad, they’d get no review, thus the possibility of my readers hearing bad music was lessened without me breaking the hearts of 3-5 young people who had been working hard, even if to make mediocre tunes. One reason I did this is because I often saw how up-and-coming writers often gave horrible reviews to up-and-coming bands in a manner that suggested the reviewer was working out their own baggage and ego issues. Often, a bad review speaks at least as much about the reviewer as the subject of the review.
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”– even if you called it a daisy, “that swirly pink thing on the plant over there,” ros, rosa, roos or, in Indonesian, “bunga mawar.” However, if you were searching online for a dozen roses, it would really help if you knew you to call roses by name. Likewise, if you wanted to sell roses, it would really help if you advertised them by name.
Since you’re not promoting rose bouquets, but a service-oriented business, it helps to have a name. Since many of our customers are single-practitioner offices, many use their given name as their business name, but this may still lead to complications. For many of us, we get a name, we stick to it, and maybe we add some titles to it afterwards. But sometimes there are complexities and subtleties to consider.
Your (Google) Place In History
Update: Since the original posting of this article in 2011, Google has dramatically changed their process for creating listings for businesses. As a result of these changes, we are now unable to create listings for our customers in the Google Places directory. We still strongly urge all business owners to create listings in Google Places (or claim existing ones), and are here to assist you in that process!