How important is a solid, professional website for a freight broker operation in 2023 forward? In fifteen seconds, it can make the difference between a new customer reaching out to make contact or clicking away to another site. The best way to think of a website as a freight broker is a bit like a suit you wear when you go to meet a client for the first time; you don’t want to show holes and stains visible. People react and you never talk to them again. A poorly designed website works the same way, but for some reason the digital world isn’t taken as seriously, costing freight brokers serious missed income as a result.

Good Websites are Not Easy to Create

While there are plenty of online services that promise to cook up a business website in a few hours with their templates, the problem comes in their inability to tailor well to what a freight broker might actually need. A good amount of interaction needs to be ready to happen if a freight broker becomes “available” online, which includes interaction tools, regular information updating, notice and messaging tools, and more. As the business grows, the site also needs to grow as well. At the same time, it also needs to have marketing tools that can deliver content and interest for new potential customers to visit. All of these elements are ideally brought together with an online marketing plan, but too often businesses just try to set up a simple site as quickly as possible without direction. The result is a poor presentation of that brokerage online and not being taken seriously.

For a well-designed website, there is also a bit of technical work involved as well. If a freight broker eventually wants his or her site to start taking in business and handling transactions, there will need to be backend architecture set up to support the same. That involves a combination of site coding, JavaScript, and PHP for server-side programming. A database interaction will also be needed for the same. These are standard components for a well-designed site, but they are hardly mentioned by template services which don’t want to scare away new customers.

Is a Website Worth the Trouble?

A good number of brokers regularly question whether a freight broker website is worth the challenge and trouble it takes to stand one up properly. This is rooted in the perspective that a brokerage business has already been established through traditional means, begging the question of what a website would add. The response to that query is simply to look at the way people search for solutions today. Online search dominates as the number one method for finding solutions for questions, business needs and similar. Even more powerful, two-thirds of modern search today happens with mobile devices, particularly with local interests. Freight brokers who are not being seen are literally missing out on that growing segment of markets actively seeking business solutions for their needs.

AI is Changing Business as Well

It’s also very important to understand that the very nature of how people find business solutions online is changing dramatically with the implementation of artificial intelligence or AI. Both search engines and companies needing services are utilizing AI more and more to speed up decision-making in their processes. The new tool's rapid adoption has been finding uses in all sorts of information management, which impacts brokers and shippers downstream.

That means those same tools are scanning the Internet and prioritizing which freight brokers provide the services needed faster and better than the brokers themselves can communicate the same. The practical result ends up being digital short lists of whom to call that could leave out non-digital or poorly designed freight players altogether. Many will argue they built their network without the Internet, so it doesn’t matter much. However, as today's customers move towards different paradigms for searching and finding solutions, the market will move accordingly.

Avoid General Builds, Focus on Freight-Specific

The best approach for launching or revamping a website is to commit to a freight broker-specific design like those offered by specialty industry design and EZ Freight websites. Instead of trying to make a generic format fit the industry, start from the ground up so that the site is entirely responsive to your customers and market segment. This immediately makes your site relevant to customers you want as well as those specifically looking for freight brokerage services. You can then focus your online energy on growing your courier and transport business versus pouring over analytics that don’t tell you what the real connection problem is with a generic template.

Industry-driven site design is really the smart way to get started or start over online. With a website design approach that is already tailored to trucking and freight brokerage, it becomes incredibly easy to set up a first-time digital presence establishment as well as grow it exponentially. A combination of quoting tools, flexible editing for changes, hosting, and industry-specific content generation can help a freight brokerage site take off quickly. Then, when partnered with social media, audiences stay engaged for constant content updating and digital value. Relevance becomes a channel producer and traffic starts creating more clients and business for a brokerage as a result. This strategy works for both those looking to redesign their existing presence as well as brokerages starting out online for the first time.