Small Business Essentials

I have written before about how important it is to find your niche, because competing on price through search engines is death for many companies. I recently learned of some interesting facts to back up this concept from Benjamin Chung, Senior Industry Marketing Manager at Google (bio below), who says Niches are taking over as the primary means of web surfing.

According to Google’s research, in 2003, the top 2,400 sites represented 50% of all page views on the internet. Just 2 years later, in 2005, nearly 3 times as many sites were needed to hit that mark—it took 6,900 sites to reach 50% of all the page views. He is seeing this trend continue and further as time goes on.

What does this mean? This means that site visitors are spread out among many smaller sites now, and not just relying on mega-sites and portals for all of their information and content.

What does this mean for the small business owner? Well, 2 things:

1. There is always room for newcomers.
   You don’t have to be the next Digg, Yahoo! or AOL to make an impact. You can produce highly relevant niche content on your own site and still achieve excellent results.
2. It is important to develop strong, focused content.
   Users are migrating towards smaller sites with topic-specific, focused content and moving away from more generalized portal-type sites.

In my next post, I will continue with Google’s view on "Relevancy Marketing".

The information from these 2 posts comes from notes on a seminar I took online offered by Marketing Profs. They have a newsletter in which you might receive some good freebies, such as this seminar I participated online, so please do sign up!

Additional Resources

• Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine

Bio for Benjamin Chung

Benjamin Chung is the Senior Marketing Manager of Google’s Business-to-Business Markets group. Since joining Google in 2005, Benjamin has been working closely with the Business-to-Business Markets team to help global companies generate leads, drive sales and increase brand awareness.

Prior to joining Google, Benjamin worked in management consulting at Booz Allen Hamilton for 5 years. While at Booz Allen, Benjamin consulted businesses on go-to-market strategies and marketing best practices. Benjamin received his undergraduate degree at the University of Washington and received his graduate degree from MIT.