White Knight

Like most people, I find myself using Google for a variety of different tasks.  I reply upon it every day.  According to Nielsens, over 90% of Australian internet users also rely on Google.

The Age (Full article can be found here) surveyed prominent business people to get an idea of their thoughts on Google:

Simon Westaway, manager of corporate communications at Jetstar
“I use it all the time, for business and recreation. I find it is quicker than using Sensis. I used to use the White and Yellow Pages online, but I’ve switched.”

Chris Richardson, director of economic forecasting group Access Economics
“Yes, I use it a lot. I think that for an economist the ease with which you can get information is very important, and with Google you get it cheaply and fast. It`s got the biggest market share at the moment because it has got the better technology and algorithms to sort through and match the search.”

In an interview on Smart Company today with Ansearch CEO David Burden (Full article can be found here), according to their research he indicated the following:

“We see that e-commerce is becoming more important to them [SME's]. Many of them are becoming a lot more aware that search engines are really their lifeblood for being found these days. So search engine optimisation, ensuring the sites appear and rank well in organic search engine listings is vitally important.”

The following graph is from Alexa, it shows the daily traffic rank of Google vs. Yellow Pages:

Google Vs. Yellow Pages

Alexa Rank is a relative measurement on how popular a web site among the Internet community. This above graph indicates that Google is significantly more popular than Yellow pages by almost 10:1. Now I agree that not all the users who conduct a search on Google are looking for a business, but a large number would be. The convenience of Google’s search results are meaning that prospective customers for say.. a plumber, will just type “brisbane plumber” and look through to find the best service provider.

So what does this mean for small business? If you dont have a website yet or haven’t yet considered some type of professional web design, you are not getting found by a large population of prospective customers.