Online Blow! Half Of UK Sites Have No SEO!
Nope!
Seems the message has not been getting through! A new 2010 study finds that nearly half of the UK’s SME websites contain little or no SEO, are not indexed with search engines and thus, fail to make any visible impact on driving visitor traffic, whatsoever!
According to a recent State of UK Business Websites Study, of a sample 1,000 SME websites analysed, around 47 per cent contained little or no SEO content.
It beggars belief that nearly twenty years since the start of the web, in today’s highly sophisticated online marketing environment, fast forwarding into mobile internet and social media led customer engagement, a staggering half of business websites defeat the purpose of their existence in the first place.
Why bother having a website if you are not prepared to invest in it’s growth and development? Learn to understand how it should properly function to enable it to perform properly so your business brand identity stands a chance of succeeding online?
The report highlights the gap between large size businesses where search engine optimisation had been more thoroughly applied and the 70 per cent of companies employing less than 50 staff with only very basic levels of optimisation, if any at all.
Further investigation revealed that 12 per cent of all business websites are not search engine indexed, 35 per cent failed to have unique page titles, and over half lacked unique page descriptions. 82 per cent of small business websites had no HTML sitemap, and 75 per cent no XML sitemap.
So why is this? Even before the internet, SMEs recognised that in order to stay in business, they have to attract custom by advertising, putting their name out in the public domain, driving their products and services to their particular chosen marketplace. Some kind of budget investment was, and is always needed, to grow and move forward.
Do the 50 per cent of SME businesses not understand that SEO and the process of link building are relatively inexpensive but absolutely essential actions that must be taken to hope to gain any type of visible presence on the web? Perhaps they are getting confused with the optimisation needed for PPC and think they haven’t the budget for Adwords?
If you are not indexed by Google or any other search engine, when a potential customer enters a search word to find an item or service, the search engine will not return your business in the search results.
Chicken and egg economics! To get visitors you need to spend money! But an SME may not have the available funds at the start and would rather wait till they are ‘up and running’. Which they won’t be unless they attract potential customers and make sales.
Some businesses battle on with predominantly offline activities, their website continually neglected as it is considered no more than an adjunct, an online brochure for simply referring customers when business cards are exchanged.
Implementing SEO across a website and devising effective marketing strategies for driving visitor traffic is the fuel that supplies energy to activate customer traffic. In today’s difficult economic times, it is absolutely necessary to business survival online, and no website owner can afford to keep their head buried in the sand one more day!