Former Apprentice finalist and entrepreneur Claire Young was singled out in a survey by BT Business for having a website that missed vital key words and wasn’t search engine friendly, according to Computer Weekly.
It was part of a wider look at fast-growing SMEs and their websites, which found that 90% of the companies don’t make their websites easily indexable to search engines.
Young has since made some changes to her website. She said she made some “really simple changes” and followed recommendations for a PPC campaign. It proved extremely successful as it “generated over 2,000 targeted visitors” to her website. She said: “It was a cost-effective exercise that brought quick results and more potential customers.”
The study found that half of fast-growing SMEs were missing out on online business opportunities because they had 404 errors. Almost half the companies didn’t even tell search engines what their pages are about.
Perhaps most shockingly, 16% of those fast-growing SMEs didn’t even have a website.
Just last month it was announced that UK FTSE companies often had their websites ranked lower by Google than their US rivals, because they weren’t optimised. A spokesman for a web optimisation company told Computer Weekly: “We were surprised to see a country which gave birth to the pioneer of the web falling behind relative to its US counterparts.”
