According to the latest data from MYOB Business Monitor, only 34% of New Zealand businesses have a website and only a fifth of businesses sell products online.

In this TVNZ report, MYOB general manager Julian Smith told TVNZ that the results of the survey are both surprising and disappointing with the majority of Kiwi businesses missing the opportunities presented by the internet.

Despite the explosion in use of the internet and the rapid development of the online economy, Kiwi businesses are little more than scraping the surface of what will be the most important piece of business technology in this half of the new century.

Smith says even the local fish and chip shop does need a website as the key factor for any business owner is being found.

The way we shop today is very much just popping on to Google and tapping in a quick search. It’s really key for a business to think how they might use the internet to support them.

MYOB says a business can just use a directory listing online but the evidence shows that a good online presence is a strong driver of business growth.

According to the survey, 44% of businesses with a website have more sales or orders in the pipeline, compared to just 30% of businesses that don’t operate online.

New Zealand has also been slow to adopt more sophisticated online tools and trends, with only 14% of businesses using social media to support business aims.

The survey, however, showed a marked generation gap in the use of social media, with 22% of business owners under 40 using social media tools to promote their business, compared to 11% of those in the over-40 age range.

The survey also provided an insight into how Kiwi businesses are actually using the internet:

• 12% writing blogs or online newsletters to promote their business,
• 14% using social media,
• 22% advertising online,
• 29% monitoring competitors online,
• 35% conducting online research and monitoring industry trends.

Smith says Kiwi businesses who are just starting to think about a website need to put it on their priority list.

Read the full story and watch the video at TVNZ.

Your website may very well be the most powerful marketing tool at your disposal. Not only it is your point of contact on the web and the place for your clients and prospects to find out information, but your website also has a huge impact on your prospects’ purchase decision. In fact a whopping 97% of the 200 surveyed buyers—from companies of all sizes—say a provider’s website has an influence on their ultimate purchase decision.

The survey was conducted by RainToday.com and included more than 200 buyers responsible for more than $1.7 billion in professional services purchased, such as accounting and financial consulting; architecture, engineering, and construction services; human resources consulting; IT consulting and services; legal services; management consulting; marketing, advertising, and public relations; and training services.

The influence of professional services websites on purchasing decisions has increased significantly over the past four years. According to the survey, 74% of buyers report the provider’s website holds at least “some influence” over their ultimate decision to buy services from the provider. This is 23 percentage points higher than in 2005 and represents a significant increase in the importance of websites.

It’s clear that having a good, well established website that delivers results is vital for professional services firms. With more and more of our daily activities conducted online, having a good website could be the key to success for many businesses.

With a well performing website you can:

• Establish that you are professional: through professional design, writing, and arrangement of content.
• Establish that you are worthy of consideration: through an overview of your services, your client list, biographies of your professionals, and case studies that show how your helped clients.
• Establish yourself as an authority: through blog posts, publications, videos, and other resources to help build credibility, reliability, and trust. All of these are essential elements necessary to win clients and increase your sales.

Say you have a small website that doesn’t really perform well in search engines. As I described earlier in my post called “Why a cheap $300 website will not work for you“, the best and easiest way to boost your search engine rankings is to add more quality content to your website. The more good content you put on and the more you promote it, the better will your website perform.

So what can you do to increase the amount of content on your website but still keep it compact and easy to use?

Here are a few tips:

1. Add a blog

Adding a blog to your website is a single, most effective way to generate fresh, quality content (see my post “10 reasons why you should start a business blog” to see the full benefits of business blogging). Blog is an easy, cost effective way to get your business visible at the top when people search for your keywords. Search engines love blogs because they offer a large amount of text content that is updated and added to on a regular basis. Because your posts are relevant to your field, you are generating invaluable content filled with the right keywords you need to rank high in searches, just by posting articles.

2. Use drop down menus in navigation

Adding new pages to your web site is great, but make sure you keep your navigation easy to use. Add a drop down menus to your main menu to logically separate the content. Drop down menus work best with horizontal menu bar. You can spread the content to more than one level too. If the layout is logical you can easily have three level drop down menu without confusing your visitors.

3. Use in-text links to offer more information

Not every page on your website needs a link in the main menu. You can easily use only links in your text to link to pages with more detailed information. Use your main menu to link to the important pages and place a link to the less important pages inside the page text. This way you keep your site clean, informative and easy to use.

4. Include “Search” function on your website.

It is important to make your website as user friendly as possible. An essential feature for any website with more than 8 pages is a search function. Search is an easy way for your visitors to find exactly what they need.

If your website is build on a solid content management system, chances are it has a search feature support already built in. Otherwise it is easy to add Google Search button to your website with few lines of code.

5. Use sidebars to publish small blocks of text

You can use the top and side areas of the website to present extra content. For example interesting facts and statistics, latest offers, news, external links – all of these are basically non essential content that you can display in the sidebar. It will give your visitors additional information in non-obtrusive subtle way.

6. Use tooltips to display additional information

If you would like to provide additional information for certain bits of text on your website, you can use special tooltip plugin to do so. Tooltips only show up when user hovers with mouse over the specified keyword which makes them nice and friendly way to display for example definitions or images.

These are just some of the things you can do to make your website perform better in search engines by adding new content while keeping it user friendly. If you do it right, you can add plenty of good content to your site without making it look too big or too confusing.

Of course there is more to SEO than just adding new content and I will try to cover more on this topic in the upcoming posts.

Have you seen any good ways of displaying additional content recently? If so, what did you like about it?

Well the title should really say “Why a small 3-page website is not the best choice for a good online presence” but isn’t that a bit long for a headline?

But seriously, in this post I’d like to highlight the benefits of spending money on a good size professional website rather than doing it the cheap way.

Side note: you may think I’m biased – after all I run a web design studio so it is best for me to sell you the most expensive product right? Wrong! It is in my best interest to provide you with a solution that will best suit your needs. Sure if I can see your business needs a $20,000 complex customized solution I will not try to sign you up for our standard $2,000 content management system just to get the job if it’s not going to work. But if I see you really only need a $1,500 website, I will not try to sell you a $3,000 system to get more money. The bottom line is the solution we give you has to work for you and it is important to me and my team you are fully satisfied with the results. It’s our clients who are behind our success.
But enough about me, let’s have a look at what’s better when setting up a website

So why isn’t a cheap $300 website going to work for you?

Cheap as in small…

When I say cheap website, I’m not talking about the graphic design aspect of how the site looks and feels (although my heart sinks every time I see flashing animated pictures and Comic Sans font). What I mean the the size of the web site – how many pages does it have. Cheap (as in $300 – $500) will usually get you just a basic 3-5 page web site with no ability to make any changes yourself.

Let’s say we compare two websites, designed by the exact same people for the same client. The first website has only 4 pages (Home, About us, Services and Contacts). The second site has about 15 pages filled with detailed info about offered services, more info on the company background and also a blog section. The second site will always rank better in search engines because it has more content and also incoming links generated by the blog.

But I only need a few pages, why is it a bad thing?

At the moment small website may seem like the ideal option for you right? After all you only need a few pages to tell people who you are, what you do and how to contact you. Maybe you think don’t really have that much to say anyway and certainly don’t want to scare your visitors with loads of text.

This is perfectly logical thinking. The only question is … how are your clients and visitors going to find your website?

Search Engines prefer larger websites to the small and simple ones.

Search engines like Google and Bing love content. Even more they love quality fresh content. As described in my post here, good quality content attracts incoming links because people will talk about it. Here is a million dollar advice: publish a lot of good, quality content and you will do well in search engines. It doesn’t get any simpler than that (of course you also need to promote the content but more on that another time).

A three page website may indeed look nice design-wise but in most cases it will not perform well when people search for your product or services. Most websites get their visitors through search engines, therefore it is vital your website ranks high for keywords related to your business. Small websites have hard time showing on the first page in Google simply because they have to compete with all the other bigger sites with more content.

The conclusion:

If you are thinking about getting a website, plan ahead and think how can you make your website useful to your visitors and clients. If you spend a bit more time and resources at the beginning, you will get much better results and ROI than by trying to do a cheap quick fix.

If you already have a website that is not performing too well, there are easy to do improvements you can make that will make a big difference if done properly. Stay tuned for my next post on how to increase the amount of content on your website but still keep it easy to use.

How well does your website perform in search engines?

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog.

I’m really thrilled that as a first post I can start with a huge giveaway and a great opportunity for anyone who needs a website build or re-designed.

I run a web design studio called Digital Arts and as a small business owner I know too well times are tough for many of us.  I also believe the best way we can all get ahead is by helping each other out. That’s why me and my team came up with the following offer:

Every other month, we would like to build a whole new website for one business completely free of charge.

This includes:

• a customized professional design
• content management system
• free hosting for one year
• SEO
• Email marketing software
• website statistics
• tips on how to make most of your website.

So I’m not talking some cheap, three page website – this is a real deal. To quantify the value of this offer I can say that at the moment my company sells this package for about 2,500 USD. In saying that the value can be relative – I have seen some of my competitors charging twice as much for similar deal so it depends who you talk to.

Anyone can sign up for either a new website or a website makeover.  To keep things transparent and fair we will shortlist the candidates at the end of each round to about 10 who we think deserve it the most and then run a public poll to select the final winner.  This way you decide who should win.

There are no hidden costs and nobody has to purchase anything from us to be eligible to win.

I really hope this offer will be well received.  I’d like to support the business community as much as I can and at this moment this is the best way I can do that.  I plan on running the free makeover initiative for as long as there is an interest in it.  This means if you have missed out, you can always sign up for another round.

I appreciate everyone’s help in spreading the word – after all the more people hear about this, the more businesses me and my team can help out.

My question to you is:

a)  If you are a small business or a startup entrepreneur, would you be interested in this?   If you are, why not register at http://www.websitemakeoverproject.com

b)  Would you be willing to spread the word for us on your favorite social network?  Or do you have any ideas how to let the business world know about this initiative? Please let me know your thoughts.

Check out the Free Website Makeover at http://www.websitemakeoverproject.com

Many thanks to everyone and I welcome all comments.

All the best,
Michal