A priceless way to lose business

I need to buy a product that I've never bought before.

I don't have a clue how much it costs. I search Google and your website appears near the top of the list. I click on it.

Will your site give me an answer to my question about price? If I'd buying a specific widget I'm sure that it will, because a shopping cart without prices won't sell anything.

But what if I'm sourcing a bespoke product? Say a patio door, some business consultancy, or a new website design. Will your website give me some indication of the potential cost?

Because if it doesn't, I'll probably move on to check a competitor's website. And I'm unlikely to come back to yours. Ever.

Google Add Another Feature to Search

Yet more information is now available to users of the Google search engine.

Yesterday Google announced the launch of Instant Previews. The concept is very simple - the user sees a snapshot of the page that was found by the search engine.

If you're using Google regularly you might have already spotted this. But it's not obvious because to make it work you need to click in the area of the search result to turn it on (at least, that's how it seemed to work in Google Chrome).

Once on, the preview changes everytime you move the mouse cursor over a different search result. It didn't work for sponsored links.

What does Instant Previews mean for businesses?

Users can see a preview of your website before they choose to click on it, and what they see might make a difference between whether they click through to you, or not.

In a search of 'plumber london' the fourth site listed come up as 'no preview available.' That might be because their site uses the nosnippet meta tag - Google warn that this turns off the preview function.

Another website has an ugly grey box at the top of the preview, indicating that it requires a plugin. When opened, the page contained a moving Flash graphic. This looks great on the page itself, but it spoils the preview.

According to Google searchers are 5% more likely to be satisfied with the page they choose when they've previewed it first.

So why not take a look at how your website appears in a preview, and think what you can do to make it more attractive.

More information on Google Instant Previews.

Want More Web Site Visitors? Add More Content

If you want your web site to keep attracting fresh eyes, it's important to keep adding fresh content.

There are stacks of businesses out there who don't bother. They invest time, effort and (usually) money in building a site. They might even pay someone to weave some SEO magic over it. Then they let it sit for months without adding a single new word.

As a result less and less people visit the site. Successful sites aren't static, they're active.

This blog is a case in point. It hasn't been updated for about three weeks. As a result the level of incoming traffic has dropped off. The same thing happened when it was neglected over the summer. No new content means visitor numbers decline.

Any business that wants its web site to play a key role in marketing or sales needs to make the effort to keep the content fresh. Adding a new page every now and again, or simply posting new blog entries, will make a difference.

It may not seem entirely logical. After all, if you have a site that's packed with information about, say, dog biscuits, then it'll keep attracting visitors searching for information about dog biscuits, won't it? Well, yes, it will. But if the content isn't changed or added to, the number of visitors will fall.

There is a continuous stream of competing new sites and pages being added daily. Search engines often have a preference for newer sites. And there's simply the effect of time - if it's old, it's generally less interesting.

So the message for me and for you is simple. If I want this blog to attract more visitors and if you want your web site to get more hits, we need to keep adding new content. It's very simple.