Small business success may depend on Google

Growing your business can be a very difficult task, especially if you are in start up mode for too long. Whether your offerings are products or services, being part of the New Media and Internet platform is a must if you want to cement your growth and access the largest market of consumers or clients, that is the Internet users. For instance, the fast approaching holiday season can represent a unique and large outlet for small businesses to set the basis of a quarterly growth, but many of them do not know how to properly take advantage of this opportunity and have non working websites. Studies have shown that Internet users are usually looking for local services and goods, Andrea Faville from Google stating that 97% of searches can be placed into this category. The bad news is that approximately 50% of small business underestimate the power of a well built website and don’t even have a working one, being completely blind to the fact that their success can hugely depend on Google, in the sense that a well indexed and optimized website will get them customers.

Not only does Google provide small business with the opportunity to access much bigger consumer market, but it also offers them the tools to start building their website, through the GYBO.com site. By building their websites on this platform, small companies will benefit from free domain name registration and web hosting for as long as one year. However, this is just a first step towards a company’s growth through the web platform. It is, how Faville puts it, “the Open for Business sign” that small companies really need if they want to be found. Google Apps is another highly useful tool that small businesses can use in their company growth process, enabling them to create presentations, spreadsheets and other documents for only $5 a month, when they are pretty expensive in general. Using Google apps also comes with the benefit of keeping everything on the cloud, which means it won’t take up space on the server, so that the website can keep running a high performance. Plus, users can access the documents and work on them from any location with an Internet connection and can also make edits in real time. Using this software is like having a social media resume, you get to promote and improve your business, and you get a real feel of what the business trends seem to be and how you can use them to your own advantage. Having this kind of social media resume is almost more important than other types of promotion nowadays, because more and more people get all their information online, so they shop online as well.

 

One of the main factors that influence the fast growing of a small business is the market and market research is an incredibly powerful tool. Unfortunately, most of the times, it is also a very expensive one. Google helps businesses in this direction too by offering them the possibility to make consumer surveys, which only cost 10 cents per response. This will get you meaningful intelligence for your business in a highly technically analyzed report, so that you can study consumer behavior. A great complementary tool is Google trends, which allows business owners analyze trends and see how particular search terms do over time, so that they can come up with relevant marketing strategies. When you have all this website building and marketing tools at your disposal, it is hard to understand why more small business do not make full use of them, in order to get their products and services online and in front of a large market of consumers.