Google and MYOB entice 50,000 small businesses with free web presence

Stan Beer
Thursday, 03 March 2011 02:11

Business IT - Technology

Search giant Google has teamed with small business accounting software vendor MYOB in a massive promotional push to give 50,000 small Australian businesses their own basic websites for free. The deal aims to make establishing a simple calling card website a no-brainer by filling in a form and includes $75 worth of Adwords for promoting the brand via Google.

Australia is country of about 1 million small businesses, the vast majority of which do not have a web presence and many, especially those in blue collar trade industries, are still living in the Sensis Yellow Pages paradigm.

Google and MYOB hope to capitalise on this by providing a virtual paint by numbers system for businesses without an online presence and hope to capture 50,000 small business tech luddites with a two year free offer, including free hosting, which can be renewed after it expires for $30.

MYOB and Google have created a dedicated website called Getting Aussie Business Online for small businesses to get their first site up and running using a simple 3-step process.

In order to get started users have to sign with either a Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn, or Windows Live Account, or create a new Google account. From there the system leads users through a simple form filling process which culminates with an editable .com.au site being generated by MYOB Atlas.

The only requirement for small businesses to be eligible for the offer is that they are registered with an ABN.

The promotion also claims to show businesses how to get noticed online, presumably employing Adwords for search engine marketing.

'Australians go online first to research local products and services,' said Google's Head of Local Business Claire Hatton. 'Every day in Australia there are 12,000 Google searches for builders, but fewer than 1 in 4 businesses in the construction and trade industry has a website. We want to address this gap by removing common barriers like cost and time to set up a website. We also want to make it easier for Australians to find the information they're looking for online.'

Tim Reed, CEO of MYOB, said, 'At MYOB, we're passionate about making business life easier and making it easy to build a professional website is an important part of that. With Getting Aussie Business Online and the MYOB Atlas website solution, we're enabling Aussie businesses to make the most of the Internet and take advantage of being connected to the digital economy. Our dream is to help over one million Aussie businesses who currently don't have a website to get online. Our initial goal is to get at least 50,000 businesses set up with a free website this year.'