It had been 5 1/2 years since I last paid a visit to my dentist. Now before you jump on my back about how disgusting that is, I shall have you know that I had no new cavities and my oral health was in good condition.
So let’s just say that I didn’t have my dentist’s phone number on speed dial, and to be completely honest – I had forgotten where their office was. I remembered my dentists name, so I did what any 25 year old would do – I Googled the dentists name. (If you’re surprised that I didn’t pull out my handy address book or look in the yellow pages then you MUST keep reading)
After Googling his name, it was on to the adventure of figuring out the office address, their telephone number, the office hours — but to my disdain, it didn’t look like they had a website. So what should have taken 1 minute to do ended up taking 10-15 minutes instead.
After the joy of having a stranger scraping and cleaning my teeth I struck up a conversation with the dentist about what I do for a living. We briefly discussed some of the online marketing opportunities available, and my general dissatisfaction with my experience trying to find their business online.
Let’s take a step back and look at this from a big picture point of view. As an existing customer of theirs, what did I want out of my online experience with them?
- Google their business name and find it ranked #1 on Google (easy to do when looking for a specific business name – look up Justin Sterenberg and see what site comes up #1)
- Find their phone number and address
- Find this in about a minute
Simply put, that didn’t happen. This is just a guess, but I would venture that about 80% of small businesses provide online customer experiences that fall far short of what their customers are looking for. The sad part is that this is a simple problem to fix. It doesn’t require a $20k flash based website, an optimized PPC campaign running split tests, or a multi-year SEO campaign. It requires a simple website build and a submission to Google Places, which you can have built for less than the crown you just put into your last appointment.
How man of you have had similar issues? Are you already a customer of a business that can’t find that business online? Sound off in the comments section below.
