Small business websites are extremely important to the consumer path the purchase. Recent LSA data found that 71% of US consumers used a company website in the past month to obtain local business information. This was the second most used channel for local discovery behind only search engines.
Despite this, the SMB website’s relevance is being questioned amid the dominance of Google and Facebook and a few others. This black and white, either-or thinking is flawed.
An SMB website is a “hub” for local business data, supporting search engines, virtual assistants and third-party directories with authoritative content. Furthermore, websites are the only asset owned and operated solely by the SMB allowing it to be a “source of truth” online. However, most SMB websites fail to be effective as these “Local Data Hubs.”
A new report from LSA (commissioned by Mono Solutions) titled, “Local Data Hub: The Future of SMB Websites” reveals the significance of SMB websites, what SMBs and consumers wish to gain from them and the role they play in digital marketing strategies. The report focuses on websites as “local data hubs,” which, is a concept that “envisions the website as a hub for the ebb and flow of local business content across the internet – not unlike a major transportation hub.”
Here’s the table of contents for the report:
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