Most of you know that I do a lot of speaking engagements, and many of them are for small business groups. Sometimes I fail to understand where small businesses are coming from. A question I was asked the other day really brought me up short, but before giving a knee-jerk response, I really thought about it and surprised myself with the answer.
A successful 60-something boutique owner showed up at a speaking engagement with her daughter in tow. Her boutique has a lease that ends in two years and her daughter is telling her that it would be smarter to move her business online than to a new location. She looked me in the eye (out of her daughter’s earshot) and said, “I understand why we need to be found in Google.” Then she furrowed her brow and asked me, “But do I really need to have a Web site?”
At first, I had to stifle that smug expert’s laughter at the painfully naive question. Search marketing without a Web site! Ha!
But hold on a second. Why do you need a Web site to participate in search marketing? Oh, I know there needs to be a Web site somewhere, but that isn’t what she was asking. Why can’t she use a hosted store from Yahoo! or someone else to house her goods?
Why can’t professionals use free blogging sites instead of creating their own Web site? I even wrote a newsletter about one professional using a Squidoo lens instead of a full-blown Web site. (I guess these other options are half-blown Web sites.)
I know that there’s more that you can do if you control your own Web site, but for a lot of folks, it’s just not worth the learning curve. So, I caught myself, and I told her, “No, you don’t need to set up your own Web site, but you do need your products to be displayed on the Web somewhere. Let me explain what your options are.”
I’m rooting for the day when running a Web business and doing search marketing won’t require so much knowledge. I already think that search is less work than most other kinds of marketing, but I am looking forward to it getting even easier. I think we’ll have a lot more good businesses out there.
