Search Engines and Internet Marketing: Small Businesses Fail to Make the Grade

May 9, 2006; 04:28 AM
Nottingham, UK - Hallam Communications announced today the results of its Small Business Internet Marketing Index. This research project measures the Internet findability for search engines of 100 small and medium sized businesses in Greater Nottingham. The results were startling: 78% of all businesses sampled cannot be found easily by the search engines.

Only 22 of the 100 businesses surveyed achieved a findability score of more than 50%. This means that the vast majority of businesses do not have websites that are designed (or “optimised”) for search engines.

With 98% of Britain’s 24 million active web users searching the Internet on a regular basis, getting found by the search engines is crucial to the success of small businesses.

Susan Hallam, lead consultant on the project comments “There’s a lot of work to be done for most of these businesses. If a company is not found in the search engine results, then that company just doesn’t exist for that potential client.

“Developing an effective search engine marketing strategy doesn’t have to be expensive; there are simple actions a business can take which can deliver a significant improvement in their findability and improve their rankings in the search engines.”

There were 7 factors which determined each company’s position in the Internet Marketing Index. These factors were selected from more than 100 variables which influence search engines like Google and MSN.

For each company the following factors were assessed:

1.The website Page Rank, which is Google’s measure of the popularity of a site expressed on a scale of 1 to 10. The Page Rank is a function of the number of relevant and high quality sites which have placed links to your site. A Page Rank of 0, 1, or 2 is an indicator a poorly performing website.

2.Correct use of Title Tags, allocating a unique title to each page with keyphrases describing the page contents.

3.Relevant Content on every page, typically with 150 or more words per page.

4.Correct use of Meta tags providing a description of the site and indexing the content for the search engines.

5.Use of a Site Map to assist the search engines in indexing every page on the website.

6.The number of pages from the business' website that Google has in it’s index, also known a saturation

7.The website link popularity based on the number of other quality sites willing to place a link to your site on their site.

The companies randomly selected for the Internet Marketing Index were Greater Nottingham businesses employing fewer than 250 staff address. Every business eligible for inclusion in the index had an email address registered in Dun & Bradstreet’s Marketplace of UK Businesses.

The study was conducted by Susan Hallam of Hallam Communications, an independent Internet marketing consultant, and former Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University.

Contact Hallam Communications if you would like to request a copy of the report, including the participating companies, a breakdown of the rankings, and graphs of the data.