The pitch: Don't let your website be a financial black hole

By NICHOLAS TEE

Not everyone who owns a hammer can claim to be a carpenter.

And just because a company has a website, it does not mean it has an internet presence.

The hammer is just a tool. Correctly used, it fulfils the purpose for which it was intended. A website is no different. Until it is correctly applied to the purpose for which it was intended, it is likely to become a financial hole that continues to incur cost and produces little or no financial return.

Yet the vast majority of commercial website owners in New Zealand fail to understand this.

Mistakenly, they believe that their website is the answer to their online ambitions. It isn't. It is simply a tool to achieve those ambitions. It is certainly not the solution.

A recent survey by us at e-commerce consultancy Access Traffic NZ strongly indicates a widespread misunderstanding of this basic concept.

The survey randomly selected 50 of New Zealand's largest companies with websites and attempted to find those websites on the Google search engine, using a series of generic search terms relevant to each company's core business.

The survey did not attempt to locate those websites using the company name, simply because most internet users conduct their searches using generic product or service-related terminology, rather than a corporate name.

The results may be a devastating indictment of the state of e-commerce in New Zealand. Less than 8 per cent of those companies could be located within the first 50 search results provided by Google.

Without visibility on the internet, a website is a waste of resources. The lack of visibility in the search engines, especially Google, indicates the lack of an appropriate online marketing strategy. And it is the online marketing strategy that dictates whether a business website will succeed or fail.

One of the four most important elements of any effective online marketing strategy is an effective use of the search engines.

After all it is the search engines that produce the only cost-free traffic to a website on an ongoing basis. And while it does require some specialist knowledge to have your website appear within the first five search results on the search engines, New Zealand businesses are fortunate in that it is generally much easier to achieve that position of prominence than in many other countries.

While other forms of online advertising are crucial to the success of any website, effective use of the search engines is an absolute priority.

Companies that decide to embrace the internet must pay attention to ensuring that their website is visible to their intended market.

And if they don't have the necessary expertise in-house, they must contract the work out, planning their budgets accordingly. With search engine technology changing so rapidly, they must also ensure they are employing specialists in the field.

Failure to attend to these "basics" will result in their websites being placed in the same "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" basket as the prominent Auckland advertising agency whose managing partner recently proclaimed on the front page of the firm's website that "if your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic".

Yet attempts to locate the firm's website on Google using search phrases including relevant terms such as "marketing" or "advertising" proved fruitless.

* Nicholas Tee is managing director of specialist e-commerce marketing consultancy Access Traffic NZ.

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