How Is Your Online Presence?

Do you have a significant online presence that will convert small business leads into clients? I've spoken at length in this blog about the importance of having a strong website and using search engine optimization to effectively target small and medium business owners. The Internet is the primary research tool that SMBs are using to source products and suppliers and a new Jupiter Research study confirms it:

"Small business executives' activity level for traditional online activities is much higher than average."

Executives small businesses with 5 employees or less, also known as micro-business owners/executives, display unique online behavior compared to other online users. According to JupiterResearch, micro-business owners/executives spend a median of 17 hours a week online, compared with 14 hours a week spent watching television.

"Micro-business executives are highly engaged online users and great candidates for behavioral and contextual targeting" said Sonal Gandhi, JupiterResearch Analyst and lead author of the report. "They are more likely to respond to this type of targeting than the average online user and are otherwise hard to target online."

JupiterResearch defines micro-businesses as companies with less than five employees and includes sole proprietorships. Micro-businesses comprise the majority of the small-business landscape. JupiterResearch also finds while micro-business executives' activity level for traditional online activities is much higher than average, their adoption of next generation tools and technologies such as blogs and social networking is more or less the same as the online average.

Promote Your Business Online

Intuit Canada released an interesting study about small businesses in Canada. The survey polled entrepreneurs with under 50 employees and discusses issues such as optimism for 2007, the role of the government to help small business, and what problems are holding entrepreneurs back from succeeding.

One of the interesting findings was that when researching information on their business and making purchasing decisions, the number one resource small business owners turn to is the Internet. More popular than asking family and friends, their accountant / bookkeeper, or the government, entrepreneurs are going online to find suppliers, make connections, and buy products and services.

This finding brings two important factors to mind: search engine optimization and website conversion.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you want to target the entrepreneurs who are looking for your products and services you need your website to come up on the first page in Google. There are many newsletters, websites, and forums (including my own) that discuss SEO as it's one of the hottest topics of the day for small business owners. If you don't have the expertise to do it yourself, hire someone. If you don't, you'll be missing out on an entire segment of the market that is very influential and carries tremendous buying power. Another advantage of using the web is that it's an effective way to reach a large audience. Calling on individual small businesses can be time consuming and a difficult strategy to turn a profit on. Having a website that is well positioned in the search engines lets the small business owners come to you. If you haven't already engaged in some sort of SEO strategy, make it a top priority for 2007!

Website Conversion
You can have all the small businesses in the world coming to your website, but it won't help your business if they don't become paying clients. You need to make sure that your website converts visitors to customers. Some of the key components are to have a compelling headline, a clean layout with bright colours, pictures of your product or service, testimonials from happy existing clients, and stories that visitors can relate to. Again, if you're serious about making your website an effective tool for your business, engage the services of an expert.