Australia has around 2 million ABN and ACN registered businesses.
The data from a survey Webomatic produced in 2014 on 40,000 businesses and recently updated to 250,000 businesses shows in Q3 2015 just north of 51% of Australian businesses recorded an Australian domain name - that is, one that ends .au.
However with an more granular analysis at least 10% of these domain names were shown to be expired, parked or onsold to an unrelated party - despite the businesses still actively trading. What customers usually see visiting a site with an expired domain name is a message from the provider advising that the site no longer exists or in worst case the domain links to a complately unrelated business or a competitor.
46% of the surveyed businesses had an associated website. 5% of sites displayed no homepage, an error page, or a 'coming soon' page. One site caused particular amusement around the Webomatic office when it was whiteboarded : site logs showed it had been 'coming soon' since 2003!.
Other interesting data that came from the survey were the 5% of sites hosted on Facebook Business, or 'free hosting' sites such as Wix, Weebly, Yola, Homestead or similar. Thankfully Twitter haven't yet come up with a method of hosting your site (we very much doubt that trying to sum up your businesses products and services could be summarised in a single 140 character tweet, or even in a tweetstorm).
The to reasons we don't consider using Facebook Business or any of the free websites is primarily content ownership, and secondarily professionalism. And despite a number of SEO specialists we know that evangelise on the 'death of the website' and the coming wave of social media promoted businesses the fact is there is a lack of cohesion across the social media tools whether Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, Etsy or other. There are some tools to give some degree of dashboard-style control such as Hootsuite or Sprout, but they require a degree of self tuition and frequent use by business owners to have sufficient payoff. And that underpins much of the benefits of social media as your mainstay for promoting your business online : whereas a website requires the occasional tweak or annual revision, social media requires constant maintenance - hours per week the time poor business owner has to find, else hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month for a social media expert to manage.
Looking back at the main dataset we broke out a sample of 5000 sites across a number of business sectors to see what the sites themselves were like. Something that became starkly clear early on was that many of the sites were likely designed around the time the domain name was registered - sometimes up to a decade ago. This was confirmed by studying the date the domain name was created, and cross referencing it with a site we use that has a chronological cache of website screenshots stretching back to 1997. Many of the sites have had no revisions in over 5 years and their age (and function) shows. All up we estimated around 87% of existing Australian business websites are in dire need of an overhaul : thats around 880,000 sites based on the 2 million ABN and ACN registered Australian businesses. Australia has only several hundred top drawer web design agencies, so this is a challenging for an industry member that may only complete a handful of site designs or redesigns a week.
Aside from issues around design and function almost all of the 5000 sample sites were not 'responsive', that is when viewed on a mobile device like a tablet, phablet or smartphone the site visitor has to scroll back and forth to view each page. Responsive sites are a relatively new design style (less than a year old) and enable a website to automatically scale to suit the screen size of the device it is being viewed on. Providing the content on a poorly designed site is adequate converting it to responsive version will normally cost only a few thousand dollars.
Having your existing site updated to a responsive version is no longer just an option, but a necessity if you want to reach the 23 million mobile devices that Australians use every day to get online. 3 of every 5 web searches, whether for information, entertainment, or to find a product or service, is via a mobile device in 2015. Not having a responsive website is the direct reason most internet users will abandon your site and visit a competitors.
Finally, some other relevant statistics that are unrelated to the survey, but important considerations for the estimated 880,000 small medium and large businesses in Australia that currently don't have a website :
The data from a survey Webomatic produced in 2014 on 40,000 businesses and recently updated to 250,000 businesses shows in Q3 2015 just north of 51% of Australian businesses recorded an Australian domain name - that is, one that ends .au.
However with an more granular analysis at least 10% of these domain names were shown to be expired, parked or onsold to an unrelated party - despite the businesses still actively trading. What customers usually see visiting a site with an expired domain name is a message from the provider advising that the site no longer exists or in worst case the domain links to a complately unrelated business or a competitor.
46% of the surveyed businesses had an associated website. 5% of sites displayed no homepage, an error page, or a 'coming soon' page. One site caused particular amusement around the Webomatic office when it was whiteboarded : site logs showed it had been 'coming soon' since 2003!.
Other interesting data that came from the survey were the 5% of sites hosted on Facebook Business, or 'free hosting' sites such as Wix, Weebly, Yola, Homestead or similar. Thankfully Twitter haven't yet come up with a method of hosting your site (we very much doubt that trying to sum up your businesses products and services could be summarised in a single 140 character tweet, or even in a tweetstorm).
The to reasons we don't consider using Facebook Business or any of the free websites is primarily content ownership, and secondarily professionalism. And despite a number of SEO specialists we know that evangelise on the 'death of the website' and the coming wave of social media promoted businesses the fact is there is a lack of cohesion across the social media tools whether Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, Etsy or other. There are some tools to give some degree of dashboard-style control such as Hootsuite or Sprout, but they require a degree of self tuition and frequent use by business owners to have sufficient payoff. And that underpins much of the benefits of social media as your mainstay for promoting your business online : whereas a website requires the occasional tweak or annual revision, social media requires constant maintenance - hours per week the time poor business owner has to find, else hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month for a social media expert to manage.
Looking back at the main dataset we broke out a sample of 5000 sites across a number of business sectors to see what the sites themselves were like. Something that became starkly clear early on was that many of the sites were likely designed around the time the domain name was registered - sometimes up to a decade ago. This was confirmed by studying the date the domain name was created, and cross referencing it with a site we use that has a chronological cache of website screenshots stretching back to 1997. Many of the sites have had no revisions in over 5 years and their age (and function) shows. All up we estimated around 87% of existing Australian business websites are in dire need of an overhaul : thats around 880,000 sites based on the 2 million ABN and ACN registered Australian businesses. Australia has only several hundred top drawer web design agencies, so this is a challenging for an industry member that may only complete a handful of site designs or redesigns a week.
Aside from issues around design and function almost all of the 5000 sample sites were not 'responsive', that is when viewed on a mobile device like a tablet, phablet or smartphone the site visitor has to scroll back and forth to view each page. Responsive sites are a relatively new design style (less than a year old) and enable a website to automatically scale to suit the screen size of the device it is being viewed on. Providing the content on a poorly designed site is adequate converting it to responsive version will normally cost only a few thousand dollars.
Having your existing site updated to a responsive version is no longer just an option, but a necessity if you want to reach the 23 million mobile devices that Australians use every day to get online. 3 of every 5 web searches, whether for information, entertainment, or to find a product or service, is via a mobile device in 2015. Not having a responsive website is the direct reason most internet users will abandon your site and visit a competitors.
Finally, some other relevant statistics that are unrelated to the survey, but important considerations for the estimated 880,000 small medium and large businesses in Australia that currently don't have a website :
- In 2005 88% of Australians consulted the printed yellowpages for products and services. In 2015, less than 17%. There are many local councils nationally that are considering banning distribution of the printed yellowpages due to the high collection and recycling costs. Over 60% of directory lookup are from the yellowpages website. A typographic mistake in a directory will take 12 months to remedy.
- Australia has 254 Free to Air and subscription TV channels, and 2300 radio stations, with the average advertisement lasting only 15-30 seconds.
- Australia has 540 broadsheet and community newspapers nationwide. Primary disadvantages are customers are able to compare your business with others in the same classifieds section, and its rare that a customer will have a newspaper with them when they need a product or service - but they will usually have a mobile device with internet access.
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