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Web site promotion and search engine optimisation specialists |
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This is part of a larger project undertaken to investigate how businesses attempt to drive traffic to their web sites, and how these processes might be optimised. The project was focused particularly on SME businesses, but many of the issues are equally relevant for large companies. If you have any comments or questions on this paper, please do contact me. This paper is split into sections, each presented as one long page, as identified below. If you would like to have the whole thing emailed to you as a PDF file, or a Word 2000 file, just let me know. Web Site Promotion - A Discussion PaperAuthor: Simon Cross Introduction & Objectives The global promotional budget for web based businesses in 2000 is estimated to be $13.1 billion (£9 billion) according to ActivMedia (1), or 10% of the total $132 billion (£91 bn) in web revenues. A Durlacher Research survey (55) estimates the size of the European B2B e-commerce market to be $76 billion (£52.4 bn) in 2000, rising to $766 billion (£528.3 bn) in 2003. They find that 28% of all European companies currently have some form of Internet connection, rising to 67% for large (more than 500 staff) organisations. The same report says the number of office workers with Internet access will increase by 34% over the next 3 years from 53 million to 71 million in 2003. Another Durlacher Research survey (M6, E-commerce: Small/Medium-sized Enterprise Market, August 2000) estimates that investment by UK SMEs in the e-commerce area (based on a sample of 800 SMEs) will rise to £3.8 billion in the next 12 months - an average spend of £21,500 per company (now £18,200). These figures however relate to the average SME, and disguise a big variation in commitment and investment in e-commerce from company to company. It appears that many of the smaller businesses are severely under-committed and under- resourced when it comes to e-commerce, and are thus in severe danger of losing out on the opportunities available to them on the WWW. Durlacher report that the biggest barriers to entry for SMEs are lack of knowledge, and board level support - a finding echoed by many other surveys. An astonishing 52% of the UK SMEs interviewed by Oftel (40), said that they believed the Internet 'could not assist my business in any way'. So far, it has been mainly larger businesses that have dominated
the online market, but Durlacher, and many others assert that the
many structural and business changes taking place in the market
now will tend to level the playing field and make it even more accessible
to small businesses. In Europe there are 36,000 large business (more
than 500 staff) out of a total of about 18 million companies - the
scale of the opportunity, and the threat, is a challenge which many
small UK traditional 'bricks and mortar' operations appear to be
avoiding. With 49% of UK SMEs connected to the Internet (Oftel survey) and over 8 million active UK Internet users (Nielsen/NetRatings M18, Internet Usage Statistics for Month of August 2000), we are rapidly approaching a critical mass of businesses and consumers in the UK who are ready to do business on the WWW. Many small businesses that have decided to develop and publish a web site, fail to adequately promote or maintain it thereafter. An increasingly common complaint from these businesses is that they are 'lost in cyberspace'. Few of their target audience even know they have a web site, or where it is. Their initial investment in a web site is wasted, and their opportunity to compete in the new economy is lost - indeed for many their future survival is at stake. Promotion is just a small part of the overall marketing and business
plan that a company must implement to succeed online. It is a vital
part though, and appears to be a major stumbling block for many
small businesses who make an effort to establish an online presence.
It is important to emphasise that this report focuses specifically
on web site promotion issues, not the much broader aspect of marketing.
Web site promotion can be defined as:
Inevitably, marketing issues must be taken into account where they become inseparable from promotional planning, and these will be mentioned briefly. The issues of retaining customers and achieving high conversion rates is not discussed here, though these are obviously vital aspects of any e-commerce operation - once visitors are attracted into a web site, it is up to the web site to engage, inform and persuade. For convenience, promotional methods are often categorised as offline techniques - the largely traditional avenues of print and other media advertising - and online techniques - which all make use of the WWW. As Janal (29) has noted, offline media are characterised by having expensive limited space, with messages focused primarily on image and brand name, and 'pushed' in 'one to many' communications. The online medium however has relatively cheap and unlimited space, where information is the prime content and is 'pulled' interactively on a 'one to many' 'many to many' and even 'one to one' basis. Online promotion is favoured by small businesses, because it is perceived as low cost, more easily managed in house (i.e. no need to hire expensive ad agencies to do the work), and uses the same medium as the web sites they are trying to promote. As will be discussed later, this is a simplistic view which may not be in many companies' best interests. Much online promotion centres on the problem of being 'lost in cyberspace', and providing a means of locating resources in the featureless, multi-dimensional space of the WWW. Even if a customer or prospect knows a company has a web site, it is sometimes impossible to find, without knowing the precise URL. Hence the focus of activity by many, on 'priming' search engines with the right information to make their sites easier to find. It is interesting to note that a lot of online promotion is designed to convey a sense of direction and location, while off-line techniques are more concerned with image and brand building. The problem of location on the WWW has increased dramatically in the last few years, with the explosion of new material constantly being published. In their landmark study in 1999, Lawrence and Giles (33) estimated the size of the WWW to be about 800 million publicly indexable pages, with the largest search engine at the time only indexing 16% of these documents. All the major engines combined only covered 42% of the material. A more recent paper by Bergman of BrightPlanet (54) identifies what they have termed the 'deep web' which they say holds a minimum of 550 billion documents, 95% of which are freely available to all users. The deep web is mostly stored within databases which are not easily accessible to the search engine spiders. BrightPlanet report these deep web sites receive 50% more traffic than the 'surface' sites covered by search engines, are more highly linked to, are the largest growing category of new information on the Internet, and have much higher quality content than surface sites. Obtaining easy access to freely available information in an unbiased way, is a problem that is likely to get worse on the WWW. OBJECTIVES
It is not possible to prescribe a specific web site promotion plan, as this is very dependent on the precise nature and individual circumstances of a business and its target market.
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