While a website can be a relatively low-cost marketing tool for small businesses, attracting potential customers to the site can pose challenges.
While a website can be a relatively low-cost marketing tool for small businesses, attracting potential customers to the site can pose challenges, particularly for smaller websites that are less likely to rank highly on international search engines.
David Lockett, a former multimedia and internet studies lecturer, started his online tourist accommodation portal, holiday-wa.net, in 1997 and has successfully navigated his way through the dotcom booms and busts by developing a solid business model.
Mr Lockett positioned his business in the niche listing of bed and breakfast, holiday home, cottage and farmstay accommodation providers across the state, staying out of the online hotel market dominated by well-known sites such as wotif.com.
The accommodation database now has more than 1,000 providers, which visitors can access through the holiday-wa.net site, and others on Mr Lockett’s online network, including holidayhomes.com.au, wheretostayWA.com.au and downsouthWA.com.au.
“The tourism industry is one of the most active industries on the internet, without a doubt,” Mr Lockett told WA Business News.
He said small businesses shouldn’t expect that, because they had a website, people would automatically come to it
“It’s relatively low-cost way of promoting a business, less than traditional methods. But people have to be able to find it,” Mr Lockett said.
By mid 2007, the holiday-wa.net site was attracting between 650 and 700 unique visitors per day, with about three-quarters of those located either interstate or overseas.
In an effort to boost visitor numbers to the site, Mr Lockett looked to Google and its associated advertising and search engine optimisation products.
“There’s no substitute for working with Google,” he said. “About 80 per cent of visitors [to the site] come through Google.”
One of its major strategies was establishing a relationship with Google, whereby the business would run Google’s regional Western Australia search engine, while adding interested WA small businesses to the search engine.
The WA search engine is displayed at the top of the home page, which provides a link to the Google page.
Mr Lockett said that, while all WA sites are indexed in the system, business websites he has added would be regarded as better quality additions, with the likelihood of a higher ranking in both the regional and international Google search engines.
“We have a trusted association with Google...when we add a website to the search engine, it’s seen as a credible addition,” he said.
And while the addition of business to the search engine is not a revenue-producing activity, Mr Lockett believes the more visits the search engine receives, the greater number of visitors directed to the site and the greater the opportunity to generate revenue through other means, such as sponsored links.
The move has already started to pay off. Since the WA search engine was set up last September, unique visitors to the holida-wa.net site have risen to more than 1,000 a day.
The WA search engine is also receiving a couple of hundred searches per day, both from inside and outside the state.
Now, the focus is to attract more businesses to register with the search engine, particularly small businesses whose websites may not rank high enough in the international search engine.
Mr Lockett and his associates are currently in the process of developing on online transaction system and a web page editor.
