Do you market web site creation to small business owners? If you do you may have come across some business owners who are reluctant to get an online presence. Here are some of the most common objections and their responses.

I don’t want to sell anything online so I don’t need a website.

Even though you don’t plan on selling your products or services on the internet directly, customers who are interested in a type of product or service that you offer will search online for someone that can provide it to them. According to recent statistics, people of all ages are increasingly turning to the internet when shopping. You may have the best quality and the best prices, but if they can’t find you online, chances are they won’t even know your business exists and you may lose many customers that way. A website with just a list of your products and your prices can go a long way.

It is too complicated to maintain, I’m not good with computers.

Having a website doesn’t require much in terms of computer skills these days. There are simple tools that you can use to update your site with new information or products. It is very easy to figure out once you get the hang of it.

I don’t want to spend money on a website, it’s too expensive.

Web design, as well as web hosting services have gotten much more affordable in the past few years, mainly due to increased competition from various service providers and an increase in the number of customers that these providers get. As your website is a business tool, it will help you get more clients and thus get more sales.

If you run a small business that only provides one main service, such as a moving company, you don’t need a complicated website. A simple site with a description of your services, your rates, some background about your company and your contact information will be enough to inform your customers. You don’t have to get a site with fancy graphics, videos or multimedia content if it won’t be useful for you.

I’ve heard all of these stories about hackers attacking business websites. I’m scared this will happen to me.

Most of the news coverage surrounding these incidents is overblown by the media. The majority of recent attacks are not actually security breaches where private information was stolen, but rather denial of service attacks designed to flood a web server with data to bring it offline. These types of attacks are mostly targeted against large companies and governments by people who have a grudge against these entities for whatever reason. As a small business owner, your website is unlikely to become the target of such an attack.

I already advertise in the newspaper or distribute fliers with info about my products. These methods have been effective for me so far, what’s the use of changing?

Setting up your website and promoting your business in the online world doesn’t mean that you will have to stop other marketing methods that you use. Internet marketing is designed to complement, rather than replace other marketing activities. Don’t forget, some people don’t read newspapers (they get all their news online) and throw any advertising fliers that they get in their mailbox straight in the trash can. By having an online presence, you will be able to get in touch with a larger segment of the population.

One of the main goals  of your business is to get your website to rank as high as possible. The reason being, if you have a higher ranking website, the more eyeballs that view it, the more revenue and business (or philantropy) you can provide for your visitors. The point of creating a website isn’t to have it sit idle and without viewers, but to get as large as the owner wants it to be. That is where ranking high in search engines is really going to help. Statistics show something like 40% of the users on search engines like Google click on the first link available, your goal is to be that site.

Ranking systems within the popular search engines used more often by browsing individuals can either give you an advantage or a disadvantage. If you are not ranked higher in these listings, then you get less exposure and that is bad when your website depends on exposure from people who want to see what you provide on your website. It is not impossible to get a top ten ranking on search engines and it does not take too much to get there if you know the simple tricks to use.

There is a wide variety of things you could do to help improve your search engine ranking. The most important thing that needs to be done is having the website optimized for search engine indexing. This optimization could be simple things like providing the necessary tags, having content that is tailored to the target audience and more. This can be done by yourself or you could hire professionals to do it for a fee. Either way, it helps to improve ranking and promotes more traffic to the websites which are being optimized.

The next option is to look into blogs and social media for link purposes. The way that some of the goliath search engines work best is by having back links to the original source. This means that the more times that a link is traceable back to the website that originates to some content or provides a simple link to the main page of the website, the more times it will show up in the search engine when searched. Many search engines combine the weight of all of the links towards the original and provide higher rankings when searched. This does take time, but is fairly worth the effort to increase ranking on search engine sites.