I thought that it would make sense to tell you a little about the results for me of having a website.  The first thing to say is that it is fairly easy to get into the top rankings on most search engines.  In spite of what you may hear to the contrary, this does not require a lot of money--sure, there are one or two search engines that want to charge you for listing your domain, or for a high ranking position--but these are mostly pretty obscure search engines that no one uses much anyway.  All the really big search engines are still offering to list your website for free. 

The ranking (in other words whether you are at the top of the list when someone searches, or halfway down the page 4) is determined by a number of factors--including the hidden parts of the code that makes a page work.  On any web page, if you are using Internet Explorer, click on 'view', then on 'source' to see the source code (in a language called 'html').  Near the top, you will see a section which begins like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="(then a list of words)">

This is one of the sections that the search engines robots (called 'spiders') read, to determine the relevancy of your site.  To choose your keywords wisely, you need to know what words are searched  by people most often, and I have access to that information, provided to me by a US search engine.

Anyway, my own business is a therapy practice, and I was doing pretty well as a result of advertising in Yellow Pages.  This costs me around £5,000 per year.  A very few years after I began having a practice website, I am now getting virtually as many new customers from the website as from Yellow Pages.  The difference is that my website costs me much less than a tenth as much as the Yellow Pages advertising.  If the number of new enquiries generated by the website continues to grow, I am considering not bothering with Yellow Pages in a few years time…

In fact, I could hardly pay for a decent advert in one local paper each week for the money I pay to keep the website running--and the results are far, far better!   Maybe that is because the website contains many times more information that a local paper ad--or maybe it's because a lot more people visit and read the website than bother to read the ad I used to run in the local paper.  (Not everyone who opens the local paper is interested in your ad or will bother to read it, but everyone who visits your site has chosen to do so.) 

So, to summarise my experience, the website has been:

• As effective as Yellow Pages advertising at a lot less than a tenth of the cost
  
  
• Many times more effective than local newspaper advertising, for less money
  
  
• People who contact me as a result of visiting the site now account for almost half of my total business
  
  
• The site also makes me different from all my competitors--only my ad has a website address on it--so only my ad gives people the chance to find out a lot more about me before phoning.  So having visited my site, they know a lot more about me than about any of the other advertisers.  Guess which therapist people decide to phone?  (Clue: it's not any of my competitors)