Cyberspace can be a lonely place for 40% of UK businesses – who get absolutely no visitors to their websites, according to the results of a new survey.
The research showed that more than a third of portals are failing abysmally to attract users from both online advertising and free listings on Google and other search engines.
The study also revealed that a staggering 91% of UK businesses are failing to do any pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on the internet.
The survey, carried out by ClickScene, found that of 10,000 UK registered websites tested, only 900 (9%) had embraced PPC advertising, such as Google AdWords, as a means of getting their name, website address and marketing message in front of customers searching for their product.
Amazingly, 4,002 (40%) of the sites do not get ANY visitors from either PPC or “natural” or free search engine results. It means the only people visiting these websites will be family, friends or those who know the actual website address.
Andrew Willis, Managing Director of ClickScene, based in Redditch, Worcestershire, said: “The internet has been popular for more than 10 years now and individuals seem to have embraced it as an everyday part of life.
“But, in general, businesses haven’t quite got it yet. There were about one million new domain names registered in the UK in 2010 but if nothing changes the vast majority of those will be very lonely places indeed.”
ClickScene has recently developed a free service that examines the content of websites and how they perform around the internet. Taking about two minutes to complete, the system suggests changes that can be made to the sites to attract extra visitors and potential customers.
Methodology
A total of 10,000 active UK registered websites were checked for visibility on the internet between 21 February and 3 March 2011.
Each website was checked against the top 20 paid and natural search results for 40million keywords/phrases.
Of these, 9,100 did not appear in pay-per-click advertising.
4,047 did not receive any visitors from the natural or free search engine listings.
4,002 did not appear in pay-per-click advertising OR receive any visitors from the natural or free search engine listings.
www.clickscene.com