It might sound a bit medieval but, as official Google Local Champions, Liberty Marketing will be riding in on their noble white steed to get small-to-medium Welsh businesses online, in touch and up to date with the internet! There won’t be any swords, shields or damsels in distress, instead we’ll be offering workshops and one-to-one support as part as the Google Juice Bar and GWBO (Getting Welsh Business Online) initiatives.

These programmes were masterminded by Google after a study found that Wales is lagging far behind its British neighbours when it comes to online business. Whilst the UK as a whole has the biggest online economy in the world, Wales is not receiving a proportional amount of this benefit. Here are a few interesting facts and figures that illustrate the problem:

• The UK online economy makes up at least 7% GDP
• That’s more that the construction, utilities and transport sectors
• The internet economy contributed more than £100bn to the UK market last year
• In Wales 25% of small-to-medium businesses don’t have a website
• Of the 75% that have a website, a mere 58% have a high web presence
• Welsh businesses with successful sites grew 7x to 8x faster than those without a well-performing website.

These statistics are the result of an in-depth, Google-commissioned study which showed a surprising backwardness in the Welsh online industry. With these stats in mind Google and the Welsh Assembly Government decided it was time to act.

Starting in March 2012, a year of online awareness will see the Google Juice Bar travelling across the country. After the launch event in Cardiff on March 6th, the Google Juice Bars and workshops will travel across the country, helping small-to-medium businesses to blossom and reach their full potential on the internet.

These workshops and Juice Bar sessions are free, friendly and don’t come with any added sales pitches! Best of all, they can cover the area of your choice. Whether you’re a total novice looking to set up a free website for your company, or want to learn how to market your existing website online – the Google Juice Bar experts are here to help.

As official Google Local Champions, the Liberty Marketing team are excited to be part of such a fantastic, worthwhile initiative. As the fastest growing online marketing agency in Wales we are passionate about promoting and boosting Welsh business online. If you would like to learn more about how to boost your business online, or would like to know more about the GWBO initiative, take a look at the following link or get in touch with the Liberty team today!

A company that I work closely with is Computer Recruiter, a recruitment agency that people use when looking for IT jobs in Cardiff, Wales. A press release of theirs was recently published in a national newspaper and included a discussion on their new website and the URL (the address of the site). When I checked their Google Analytics the next day to see the effect this release had on their traffic, there was roughly a 50% increase. This was to be expected, but there was also one surprising fact that I did not expect to see.

When looking at the source of this extra traffic, I assumed that a large part of it would be direct traffic, i.e. people who typed the URL that they had just read into the web-browser address bar. There was actually zero direct traffic that day. All of the new visitors chose instead to visit Google and searched for keywords like “computer recruiter”, “computer recruiter Cardiff” and “computer recruiter ltd”. Even when presented with a URL, not one person chose to type it into their address bar and go straight to the site.

What does this mean to your business? It highlights that if for no other keywords then your business needs to rank well on the ones that make up its name. This sounds obvious but many companies do not, especially those with names made up of generic, descriptive words. For example, a car retailer with a name like “Prestige cars” will be competing with thousands of other sites for the keyword “prestige cars”.

For businesses of this type, the consequence of not appearing for their name could be severe. It is likely that your competitors will rank for these search terms, especially if they practice search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques. Imagine that you had paid for the writing and distribution of a press release or the inclusion of a magazine advert and rather than bring new visitors to your site all your marketing campaigns did was lead customers to your direct competitors. Your market share could start shrinking without you even knowing it.

So, how do you stop this from happening? A few search engine optimisation basics include having your business name as, or at least within, your URL. You should also include your name on your homepage and “about us” page as 5-10% of the copy. When generating links to your site, you should make most of the anchor text rich with the keywords that you want to compete for, but every once in a while put your business name in there as well.  You could also set up some Pay Per Click adverts that bid on your company name and similar keywords.

In future blog posts I’ll discuss online marketing and search engine optimisation techniques further to help you start appearing before your competitors on Google.