A great article form AOL Small Business
Despite a growing Web presence among small businesses these days, the majority still don’t use their company’s website for e-commerce initiatives or know the traffic numbers for their site, a new study shows. According to a recent survey of 1,200 independent business owners conducted by Newtek Business Services, the Small Business Authority, 65 percent of respondents reported that that they don’t take payments for merchandise on their website. Additionally, when asked about the current state of their website, 31 percent of business owners said they were unhappy with their company’s Web presence, while an additional 15 percent reported not having a Web presence at all.
In analyzing the results of the survey, the Small Business Authority, a distributor of small-business services and financial products, commented that factors such as businesses not knowing how to make changes to their websites, or having sites that were created years ago and are therefore out-of-date, would explain the lack of certainty among many small businesses about their Web presence. The Small Business Authority also found that several businesses created their sites at a time when search engine optimization and search engine marketing wasn’t a real science yet, and are now requiring a major update to their online presence.
Along the same lines, the survey reported that many small-business owners did not use website monitoring tools and were somewhat clueless about traffic patterns that drive customers and sales to their business. According to the survey, 63 percent of respondents said they were not using any traffic monitoring tools for their website, compared to 21 percent who are. “It’s important that small to medium-sized business owners use the tools that are available to them to compete with big business,”Barry Sloane, president and CEO of the Small Business Authority, said in a statement.
