Today, to promote your business on the Internet, there are two options:
- Build your own website
- Register in virtual catalogs or directories
Build your own website
It is the most common and most immediate option for newcomers to the web: opening your own storefront on the Internet.
Very often, the goal is to create a beautiful website and showcase the company’s strengths as best as possible while neglecting a fundamental reality: a beautiful website that is not visited is useless, except for needlessly consuming money and resources.
It is like exhibiting at the Hanover trade fair on a stand located 2 kilometers from the exhibition grounds, without any signposts or road leading to it.
To remedy this, some companies take advantage of their clients’ naivety to offer so-called “SEO” services alongside the creation of a website. Very often, this amounts to nothing more than simple indexing in search engines.
However, to achieve effective and lasting positioning in search engines, it is necessary to implement a genuine marketing approach. This groundwork will then make it possible to organize the structure of your site and produce relevant content. That said, the services offered by some web designers are very often just technical tricks with short-lived effects. Not to mention that search engine crawling techniques increasingly favor content over makeshift tips and tricks.
An example recently cited by a client: look, when my name is typed into Google, my site appears in the first position, so I am very well ranked… certainly, if your name is Siemens, Renault or IBM, that is no doubt a source of traffic. But if your company is called Duchmolle SA, there is little chance that customers who do not know you will type your name into Google.
Another important point: any effective action requires measurement and monitoring. Clearly, to adapt your online visibility strategy, you will need to measure your audience and profile your visitors (where do they come from, how did they find you, etc.). Although measurement itself is technically not complicated and inexpensive with current solutions (or even free), analyzing the results and the resulting action plan require experience and specialized expertise.
In short, to do it properly, you need:
- A high-quality marketing / SEO service
- A web design company to create your site
- Possibly a hosting provider if your service provider does not offer one
- An associated service contract so that you can measure your audience and track changes in your positioning
It is easy to understand that an investment of this kind is very difficult to make profitable for a very small business.
Hence the temptation to look for simplified solutions, for example asking the neighbor’s son or an intern to build the site, or calling on a company that boasts about the virtues of the 1,000-euro all-inclusive website, with graphic design, content formatting, positioning and SEO included, of course (if you have read the above, you understand why this kind of offer is not credible).
Virtual catalogs and directories
To meet the visibility needs of company websites, many directories have emerged. Their way of working: put a descriptive page for a company online with a short presentation text and categorize companies using keywords. It is somewhat the same principle as the Yellow Pages. While the concept may prove effective for finding a doctor near your home, I doubt its usefulness in the B2B world. I was discussing it just yesterday with a buyer in the automotive sector who was explaining how many times he had wasted time calling providers thinking they made seals for the automotive industry when in fact they made window seals. That says it all…
On the other hand, when it comes to virtual catalogs, there are solutions that have proven themselves. Sites like Direct Industrie have managed to bring together thousands of industrial suppliers in one place, and it must be acknowledged that it works very well for cataloged products.
The only drawbacks:
- How do you stand out with high value-added products or an innovation?
- How do you highlight a service offering?
If, therefore, dear reader, you are an SME that does not have 20k euros to invest in a professional website-building approach, and if, on top of that, you offer innovative services, should you conclude that all you have left to do is get back in your car and go prospecting the old-fashioned way?
Of course not… that is what we will see in a future article.
