In the second part of this series we look at another reason why small business owners ignore the power of the web at their peril.
As more and more of your customers turn to Google (or other search engines, although they hardly make a dent in the big G’s domination), more and more companies are beginning to realize that getting on the first few pages of the search results is critical to generating new sales leads.
This is borne out by statistics:
- There are over 16,000 UK searches on Google every minute
- Google powers 9 searches in every 10
- Around 80% of people will turn to Google as their first port of call when trying to find out about a product or service
- Over 60% of search engine users only view the first page of the results before further refining their search
The last two of those bullet points should sound familiar to most of us. If we examine our own online behaviour, we will realize that when we have been looking for information on a particular topic, we rarely dig deeper than 2 or 3 pages before thinking of a different way to approach our search.
Obviously this is because there are so many sites competing with each other in the same marketplace, that a simple search of one or two keywords more than likely gets the user no further forward, as the results can be quite vague.
For example: Search for “Trainers” and what do you get?
On the first 3 pages we get:
• Shops selling training shoes
• A vouchers website
• A portal for racehorse trainers
• A portal for personal trainers
• A business language training company
• News stories about the shoe industry
• An NHS public health initiative
• A portal for dog trainers
• Business education sites
• A fitness equipment supplier
…I could go on, but you get the idea. What if I actually wanted a trainer for my new dog? In the first 3 pages, there is only one relevant link. Would I click on that or refine my search to “dog trainers” ? I might actually want to refine it to “dog trainers in north London” .
Only then do I begin to get results that are actually beneficial to me – the one that lives in North London, has a new puppy and needs some help with training him.
So does this (quite obvious when you think about it) behaviour affect the small business?
Well, we have always believed that businesses are as big as they wish to appear. And especially in the world of Google and internet dominated information exchange, that is true more than it ever has been in history.
Companies must understand how Google works and use that to market their website, to maximise their website’s exposure in internet-land, thus increasing the number of incoming links they have from other sites. Google thinks of incoming links as referrals, recommendations. It’s the only way it can realistically judge content quality, since it is still a robot. The more incoming links, it reasons, the more likely the site in question is to be a leader in that particular field. So that site is rated higher in the search listing than a site with few incoming links.
For the small business the behaviour of refining keywords described above can become crucial. Companies like ours can’t compete with the corporate giants when it comes to creating content and generating web exposure – more often than not we don’t have the time or resources. But what we can do is carve ourselves a niche. A small part of the search listing where, because of the specialist knowledge we have, we are considered the top dogs. Using specialist content, blogs and social media we can let the world know what we’re best at. And that’s where we get the most crucial element to letting Google know what we’re best at – those all important referrals – incoming links.
Links:
• Visit our website for more information
• Get a quote for your project
• Find us on LinkedIn
• Find us on Facebook
Share this post:
RSS 2.0
[...] If the web is so powerful, why do so many small businesses neglect … [...]