The importance of Websites in Digital Marketing

Prof. Soumi Chakraborty, Sr. Lecturer, IQ City United World School of Business, Kolkata
The effectiveness of Digital Marketing can only be realised by businesses once it has a digital presence. Digital presence is often synonymous to websites. Companies across industries can reach out to their target audience globally by creating a website. Let’s say, a local apparel boutique wants to expand the business. Now that every business is transitioning from traditional to digital media, website is the first aspect that needs to be focussed upon. Once a visually appealing website is created, various Digital Marketing tools and techniques can be implemented to reach out to the audience. A website with good content has better chances of ranking high in search engine result page. However, the rank does not remain constant. With growing competition, a greater number of newer and unique websites are created every day. A business has to constantly work upon the content and optimize it in regular intervals to sustain in a relatively higher position on the first page of the search engine. Why is it so important to be on the first page of the search engine result page? It is actually quite simple. Everyday, we all are in search of some or the other product or services and the search engine is our saviour in those scenarios. We usually prefer to click on the websites which appear on the first page once we enter the search keyword. In case we do not get the desired result, we prefer changing the keyword instead of looking for the result in subsequent result pages. Mostly, there are two types of business:

• product-based
• service-based

In case of product-based business, people visit the website and search for desired products. Once order is placed, the customer is redirected to the payment gateway in order to complete the transaction. For a service-based business, potential customers usually search for the desired service in the website. Many a times prospective customers end up reading blogs pertaining to the exact service they are look for to get a detailed insight on the same. This eventually helps in faster purchase decision. In a nutshell, it can be said that a website is a building block of digital presence of a business which helps in reaching to the right set to target audience, build brand awareness, generate lead and eventually drive revenue for the business.