Your website is one in a billion, so make it stand out
Did you know that there are over 1 billion websites on the internet? And that number grows by one every three seconds
Karsten Smet CEO, ACI Group
Reading Time 4 minutes
Faced with these numbers, it’s tempting for SMEs to take a tokenistic approach to a website. You make one because you should, just like you should set yourself up with business cards and the rest, but you don’t really have the time to invest in making it stand out. Besides, you can see the glitzy, instantly gratifying world of social media right over there, where you can set up a page and start building a brand for free, within five minutes. They even have memes over there, and several of them are funny! So, you create a basic website using one of the many code-free templates out there, put some content on it, and get on with one of the many, many other jobs that need taking care of.
This starts a vicious cycle where your website doesn’t bring anything to your business, so you don’t devote any attention to it. But if you don’t devote any attention to it, it’ll never bring anything to your business. It’ll just sit as a lonely link on your social media pages generating a handful of hits every month, gathering virtual dust, used as proof you exist, and nothing more. Egg, chicken. Chicken, egg.
The truth is that taking this approach to your website is leaving money on the table. Your website is the window to your business – it’s your space where you can explain who you are and what you’re about on your own terms. And it pays to make that explanation as easy to digest as possible, whether that’s through text, videos, interactive elements, or anything else you can think of. Most of your customers will be looking at websites to validate their buying choice, and thinking ‘is this a company I want to be associated with?’
You can control what your customer sees and take them on a guided tour of your brand’s story. Everything that’s unique about your business should be represented on your website – you wouldn’t accept a cookie-cutter business model, so why would you accept a cookie-cutter website?
While standing out amongst a billion other websites isn’t easy, remember that a lot of those websites will be thrown together with a template – that’s exactly why they’re popping up at a rate of one every three seconds. That means the opportunity is there for an SME willing to give their website a personal touch. And there’s no reason that SME can’t be yours.
That does mean some investment is required, either in regularly updating a code-free template, or in a web developer who can build something that more closely fits your needs. The template approach is more accessible and agile for SMEs, but it offers minimal control. The custom-built approach gives you complete freedom over your website, but it can be costly and complex for SMEs who already have dozens of plates to keep spinning. Either way, getting it right means that investment will pay off many times over.
Our own solution, Oomph Pilot, offers customers a solution that makes it easier to get the balance right, fitting neatly into the middle of these two options. It offers each user a fully customised and customisable website, but without the hassle and expense of an overwhelming DIY platform. It pairs users up with a real web developer who optimises the building blocks of the site for speed and SEO, while using a modular system of drag-and-drop blocks that gives the SME full control over how it looks and feels.
This provides secure, scalable site architecture that makes it easy to continually update the site with new content and pages when necessary. This is an important point to remember when talking SEO. There’s more to it than simply stuffing your website with keywords. A standout website will be built with SEO in mind, but it’ll also be continually updated with fresh, relevant content. You can’t ‘complete’ SEO – it’s a process. As such, Oomph Pilot is designed to facilitate that process, making it as efficient as possible when you need to edit and update web content.
We’re an SME ourselves, and we needed a solution that could accomplish all of the above. So, we made it ourselves. And now, we’re sharing it with you.
Your website is one in a billion. There’s no better platform to communicate the uniqueness of your brand’s offer to customers. In a digital landscape awash with cookie-cutter templates and AI-generated slop, a personally crafted website stands out like, well, one in a billion.
Karsten Smet CEO, ACI Group
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