U.S. Companies Might Be Wasting Billions on Web Development

By Consulting Specifying Engineer Staff January 29, 2007

Every year, U.S. companies spend thousands of dollars on Internet services for their web sites, including for web design, hosting and programming. This may total in the billions of dollars for the entire U.S. industrial base. A new study shows that more than 70% of that investment may have been wasted due to potential customers not being able to find the web sites.

The survey was a random selection of 500 sites covering 14 industries including chemicals, polymers, pharmaceuticals, automation and material handling. Five pages within each site were then ranked on seven key criteria such as meta tags, robot tags, flash, frames and overall strategy.

“In today’s competitive… environment, companies find it necessary to continue to invest in their corporate web sites.” Suto said. “The study demonstrates that these same companies are simply not doing enough to draw traffic to their sites, and gives solid suggestions on how to improve.”

Copies of the study can be obtained from the Search Circus website.

The “2006 U.S. Industrial Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Study,” which was conducted by Search Circus , an Ohio SEO firm, shows that only 26% of the 500 industrial web sites studied have an “excellent” SEO strategy. An excellent SEO strategy, said Wendy Suto, president of Search Circus, is what is necessary to consistently appear in rankings of top search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN. However, a score of “excellent” does not necessarily mean a web site ranked well in search engines—just that some kind of web marketing strategy exists.