Posts tagged Internet Consultants

Are you the owner of a small business and you’re wondering why your internet business web site isn’t producing the results you were hoping for? Well, take heart, because, sadly, you’re not alone. A survey done by UK web hosting company, Streamline.net, titled “Small Business Bytes Survey”, contains some very discouraging information as far as small business web sites and their management are concerned.

Let’s look at some of these disturbing facts and figures.

Lack Of Fresh Content

Even though two thirds of the businesses surveyed stated they had owned an internet business web site for at least 2 years, only 10 percent said they make daily updates to their sites, and only 25 percent made monthly updates.

One of the most important aspects of a search engine optimisation campaign is the creation of fresh, informative content, which both the search engines and visitors value highly and which has a huge influence on the ranking of a web site. Not only that but the content of your web site, provided it is good quality, can set you up as an expert in your field, which will attract more visitors to your site and make other quality sites in your market more willing to provide you with an inbound link, which will help boost your ranking even more.

Technical Tweaks

In addition to adding fresh content to a site, it’s also important to make sure your site is functioning well technically. The survey indicates that only about 54 percent of business owners make infrequent technical tweaks to their web site.

This could be due to a lack of technical expertise, lack of budget, lack of awareness of your site’s performance or a combination of all three. Whatever the reason, monitoring your web site’s performance and performing occasional technical tweaks to improve its performance are essential if you are to succeed with your online business.

It could be your keywords aren’t yielding the desired results, so the actual keywords being used should be examined, along with their placement on the related page of your site. If your visitors are searching for your products using strings that are different from the keywords you’re using, it’s probably time to change your keywords. This is especially true if you’re using any pay-per-click advertising, which can be an expensive proposition if you’re targeting the wrong keywords.

Domains, Domains, Domains

A third of survey respondents had only one domain name, and three-quarters of respondents owned fewer than six domains.

When it comes to internet business and getting your brand in front of people, the mantra is “The more, the better”. The more domains you have out on the internet, the greater the chance someone will find at least one of them and possibly make a purchase or take the action you desire. Domains are pretty cheap, so just one customer per year could cover your costs. The additional domains don’t have to be set up as web sites – they can just redirect the visitor to your main site. Most hosting companies provide this functionality at no extra cost.

Advertising

Advertising your business on the internet via PPC (pay-per-click) or CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) is an important element of search engine optimisation, but only just over half of firms surveyed said they were participating in search engine advertising.

Getting free traffic to your site is great and something every business owner should strive for, but you can get much more targeted traffic through advertising your business on the search engines. There is an expense involved, so keeping track of how your ads are performing is essential, but the expense can be more than offset by the conversions you can achieve.

Tracking Your Web Site’s Performance

Thanks to the availability of analytics, tracking the performance of your web site through various analytics reports is fairly simple and straightforward, yet only about two thirds of firms take the trouble to check such things as their visitor stats.

Knowing the number of visitors your web site receives, how they got to your site and why they leave and where, in addition to other performance statistics available via analytics, is integral to knowing whether or not you may need to make adjustments to your web site and exactly where. Using analytics reports can remove all the guess work from search engine optimisation efforts, and yield results much quicker and more efficiently.

If your internet business isn’t getting the results you were anticipating, maybe you see yourself and your business in the survey results discussed above. If so, it may be you’re unaware of the importance of these facets of an online business and/or have never received training to enable you to address these issues. Either way, if you’re serious about achieving success on the internet, you owe it to yourself and your business to either look into these issues yourself or hire an internet consultant to plug these gaps in your search engine optimisation strategy.