While offline is a prominent and age-old strategy to market your products but most businesses nowadays are also finding success on online platforms as well.
With around 400 million Internet users, 300+ million smartphone users, India is now being seen as the go-to destination for online research and growth. Still, according to a recent Google-KPMG report, close to 32 percent businesses are still offline and are missing out on a golden opportunity to tap an even larger audience. They neither have listed their business on the web nor do they have their website set up.
Google now plans to change the same, helping you induce growth into your business, with the release of a brand new feature called Website With Google My Business. This is an add-on component to the existing business-focused portal and aims to help you build a mobile-optimized website within minutes — even via your smartphone. It is specifically focused towards small and medium-scale enterprises.
Commenting on the launch, Shalini Girish, Director of Marketing Solutions at Google, said:
Small business owners tell us that building a website can be complex, expensive, and time-consuming. In order to solve these problems for them, we introduced a new simple, free, and fast way to build a mobile optimized website through ‘Website With Google My Business.’
This means if you’ve registered your business with Google then you’ll be provided with the necessary tools to create your very first website for free. It is basically a website builder tool, you just need to put together the necessary info and choose a design to debut your official website within just ten minutes.
The said feature will provide simple, templated, editable websites where you’ll be able to pull together your data and photos from Google Search and Maps. The Mountain View giant will then handle the design and searchability of such businesses on its various platforms, such as Search and Maps. You can either gain access to a free domain or buy one yourself.
This product is specifically focused towards emerging markets, especially India, where the number of Internet users is expected to double in the next five years. It is being made available in ten languages including English, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Kannada, and Malayalam.
Over the past five months, Google has been conducting a pilot roll-out program with around 120,000 Indian businesses. The major samples, if you’d like to check them out, are Pet Palace Dog Hostel (garnered 10,000+visits) and an independent Mehndi artist that is based out of Noida (received over 6,000 visits).
