Rent hikes and a disruptive town-centre renovation threatened the future of
Nathan Wood’s Derby-based electrical retail business in 2002.
Interested in the idea of selling goods online, Wood set up a website,
Dustbag.co.uk, selling vacuum-cleaner bags. It soon took off and two years
after its launch he closed the shop to concentrate on the new business.
Wood now sells vacuum dust bags of all makes throughout the UK and Europe and
business is brisk, he said. “We’ve been growing at 40% year on year, which
is much faster than we originally expected. Without the internet we would
not have survived.”
His venture is just one example of how small firms are using the internet to
transform their businesses. While the high street suffered, online sales —
often through small specialist retailers — continued to grow, said Cameron
McLean at the payment website PayPal.
“The internet does give you the chance to get up and running very quickly and
we’re seeing very strong growth in e-commerce in the UK. It’s a good
leveller of the playing field. It’s interesting to see how small retailers
are faring now compared to the 1990s when it was very hard to compete with
established high-street chains.”
However, small retailers are not the only ones who can benefit, said Dan
Cobley at Google UK.
“If you don’t have a website it’s no longer expensive or difficult to set one
up. In 10 minutes, without technical skills, you can create a basic one. You
don’t need any coding and what would have cost you hundreds or thousands of
pounds a few years ago can be completely free now.”
Despite this, many firms had been slow to capitalise on the internet, said
Cobley. “A quarter of UK businesses, up to 1m, don’t have a website and,
anecdotally, about half of those that do have a website don’t do anything
with it.”
A common mistake many firms make is creating a website and expecting visitors
to come to it, said web-marketing expert Nikki Pilkington. “A lot of people
still expect visitors just to find their website. Making your site visible
to search engines is vital if you want to attract traffic.”
Before you spend money paying search-engine-optimisation (SEO) experts to get
your site high on search-engine listings, there are simple things you can do
yourself, free of charge, said Pilkington.
“Make sure you have the right key phrases on the title of each page and in the
text of the website. If you are a plumber in Wigan, for example, you need
search engines to find your business by using those terms in your website in
the text and the titles of the pages.
“If a designer is building your site ensure that they also include these
phrases in the meta description tags \.”
