How can your small (Mauritian) business benefit from the Internet ?
This article is based on a real life project. It aims to show small business owners, whatever the field, how such businesses can drive leads out of a small scale but really optimised website. I’ll be taking the example of a small scale French business (18 employees) specialised in aluminium zinc works with which I worked and which made over a gross million euros over 3 years just through its website.
Website. This word and its concept is rather unclear for a whole lot of users online. Worse, many business owners hear and talk about the Internet and websites without ever getting a grasp of the concept. Some understand the possibilities and power of using the Internet and others just do not want to even hear about “that thing”. Huge mistake, especially when it comes to small businesses. Why? Because small businesses are more flexible and faster than large scale ones which are already missing a lot on the web. Moreover, being small means being more available locally, thus having better conversions locally, therefore securing contracts easily.
Real life example: Euralu.
Euralu Zinguerie is a small family business working locally in the Rhone-Alps and Auvergne regions in France. It employs 18 persons who are all local experts in zinc works and aluminium stripping for roofs. Nothing to do with the Internet, heh? However, the founder of this enterprise is tech savvy and had heard about websites and was ready to give it a try with a relatively low investment. The idea was to compete with its closest competitor regional Dal’Alu. The latter is a big group with small franchises disseminated everywhere in France.
The process.
The Euralu Zinguerie process was rather simple. The aim was to (re)create its identity and build a website that would have permanent calls to action to generate leads. The site would also need to compete with a minimum but long lasting search engine optimisation.
The conversion issue had to be tackled even before getting into the design process. The latter had to be extremely light to be able to give more importance to content (hence content to search engines). After some tries, we settled for the possibility of getting into direct contact with the company from all the available pages. This gave the direction for the design process as well as the upcoming SEO.
Minimal effective SEO.
Based on its nature, the site was more of the static type with minimal PHP just for the contact application. Aluminium zinc works being a really specialised field, it would have been really difficult to find specialised directories, especially in France, to get the site boosted by backlinks and exogenous SEO. The other thing was that the SEO wouldn’t have to be maintained (reducing website costs).
We therefore had to base all the SEO on the content and treated each page as a single, optimised entity. Each page has been built around one theme and we even used the site’s static file structure to optimise the whole lot. Site navigation was set to have it always available at eye level and all the specialised parts have been cross linked to maximise crawling. We also made sure that the business field “zinguerie” was present in the domain name.
Results.
Analysing conversions and results for this website might be done from different points of view but, after a friendly call to the founder, I got material to analyse both sides of the medal: online leads as well as offline.
Online.
Okay, so what goes on online for this website? In 3 years, the website’s PR is 0/10. What? 0? Yes, 0 and this kills all your misconceptions on PR because the site boasts 2nd on “zinguerie aluminium” just after the national leader 4th place on “zinguerie alu” and between first and 10th place on most of its strategic keywords such as: entreprise spécialisée zinguerie.
Along with this, is the conversion rate. Here is a screenshot of the conversions over 3 years.
1.74%, not much? We had set a simple calculation of how much it would have cost to get these persons to convert. The investment over 3 years would have been $495/350€/MRU Rs 14 775. So these are the gross savings made over the Internet for new clients. All in all, about 60% of these clients have hired the company.
Offline.
One of the good ideas we’ve had on this site was to set the phone number just beside the contact form. Notice how easy it is to get contact information from any page of the website. This, on its own, has generated about 150 phone contacts (every new contact is asked how it heard of the company). Here again about 60% of the clients signed for business.
Conclusion
Many are expecting, at this stage to know how much money came in. I have no clear sum to give but this is what I got from the founder. On average, the minimum contract signed (due to the nature of the work and the involvement of raw materials and travel expenses) is 8 000€ (MRU Rs 338 000) and the maximum can go to as much as 30 000€ (MRU Rs 1 260 000). In remaining on the minimum average with an 60% full conversion rate from the web for this small business, the average contracts signed via the website over the past 2 years is a gross 1 008 000€ (MRU Rs 42 504 000). And let’s keep this in mind: Euralu Zinguerie is but a mere small scale local business.
Let’s talk about this…
What is your view of local Mauritian businesses going online? Should they try to get in the gap NOW while the big fishes are still milling around doing nothing? Do you use search engines to find local information and goods? Would you like to have access to such small businesses online? Some small Mauritian businesses are online, do you think they maximize or should maximize their conversion rate?
Category: Business, Design, Featured, Resources, Search Engine Optimisation, Standards
Twitter: kurtavish
(remember you mentioned about smthing related to me once ago).
Mauritius businesses going online is a must and I think many are realizing its importance now.
However I am pissed off by many companies pretending to do Class X or Class WHATEVER SEO and charging enormous amount of money to fool their client here. The worst is that they don’t know a damn about SEO and are only doing trial and error with their client’s site. (Not all but most Mauritian companies doing this work are…)
On another side, some mauritian businesses paid money to make a site…and then..nothing. Its just like making a site and leave it to die there. They do not use it to its max to gather more.
You know what? Think we gonna start a killer company ourselves lol
We create but also do an awareness campaign lol
Kurt Avish´s last blog ..Chemical Ali Hasan al-Majid Executed
Twitter: sachindb
True enough, demand and offer are the levers that will make things change. However, offer is what will maybe make things work and this is where there’s a problem. Visibility is not here. Results are not quantified and offered to the possible customers. This is why I wrote this article. To show the reality of what the web can be for a company investing in it.
A website is a tool to maximise turnover and whatever the size of a company, this sets it in great tracks for customer relationship. Active commercial communication can be based on that.