Survey Identifies Five Big Obstacles to Online Success


Survey Identifies Five Big Obstacles to Online Success

Most businesses need to maintain an online presence today. But achieving online success in this increasingly competitive space is a huge challenge, a new study has found.

The survey conducted by GoDaddy and Alignable reveals five top obstacles to a business’s online success. Here is a look at each in a bit more depth.

Building Your Website

According to the study, more than 51 percent of small businesses hire a professional Web designer to build their website. About 26 percent of businesses use DIY Web builders like Wix, GoDaddy Website Builder and Squarespace.

Free website builders provide all the basic tools small businesses need to get up and running in no time, the study says. Before building a website, businesses must properly understand what they need. A clear understanding will make it easier to build a customized site.

Branding Your Website

A cluttered online space means finding a domain name that hasn’t already been taken won’t be easy. The study also confirms this. It finds that 50 percent of small businesses own more than one domain.

If the domain you are looking for is already taken, get creative. For instance, if you are keen on the domain name www.juiceexpress.com which is already taken, consider options like juiceexpress.us or juiceexpress.biz.

Optimizing Your Website

An extremely interesting finding of the study is that 91 percent of small businesses are looking for more opportunities to generate revenue from their website. On the other hand, 40 percent of businesses are creating and sharing content via blogs less than once a month. So these insights clearly highlight there’s plenty of room for growth.

Customer Communication

More than 70 percent of American consumers prefer email to communicate with businesses. For these consumers, trust is a big factor. So if your mail ends with a generic email address like @gmail.com, they may doubt the legitimacy of your business, the study finds.

Selling Products Online

About 48 percent of small businesses sell their products or services on the Web. A key step to growing your business involves enabling users to make purchases from your website. Branching into ecommerce is an effective way to build business online.

Easy-to-use ecommerce site builders and online marketplaces like Etsy are making it easier for businesses to reach more customers.

For the study, GoDaddy and Alignable surveyed more than 100,000 small business owners in North America.

Boston-based Alignable is a social network for local businesses to generate trusted referrals. GoDaddy is an Arizona-based Internet domain registrar and Web hosting company.

Image: Alignable


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Shubhomita Bose Shubhomita Bose is a Staff Writer for Small Business Trends. She covers key studies and surveys about the small business market, along with general small business news. She draws on 8 years of experience in copywriting, marketing and communications, having worked extensively on creating content for small and medium sized enterprises.

2 Reactions
  1. I thought that the article will talk about obstacles but it is more like talking about steps instead.

  2. There are many obstacles in creating a website that generates money. First of all, you need to focus on the user experience – web design + responsive design (mobile friendly is not enough in this day and age) + great, sharable content. This are the first steps, and from my experience, many business owners fail them because they think that if they have a website – people automatically will visit, enjoy and buy from it. That’s not the case. Then we go into SEO, and that’s a very tricky step. If we’re talking e-Commerce, every respectable business needs a CRM solution and if you don’t want to write 300 invoices/day you definitely need an ERP. And these are just the basic obstacles in being successful online.