Google Small Business Websites

Do You Own a Small Business? Are You a Solopreneur?
Is Google Giving You a Bad, Free Deal?

As if Google isn’t big enough, it is now getting into the small business website development and hosting business. It has done this outside the US for a little while now and this summer it has reached out to small business owners in Texas and Vermont.

It is obvious to see that the more businesses are online, the better it is for Google and local, small businesses are really the final frontier when it comes to getting online. It today’s economy more and more people are looking to do their own thing and create their own businesses because it has become evident that relying on a job is going to be very difficult in the future.

At GoBeyond SEO, we want to see these small businesses succeed. And there are tons of tools out there that can help them along the way. Are Google small business websites one of these tools? Let’s take a closer look and find out.

In the United States, Google has launched this offer in Texas and Vermont so far. In this post we will examine the offer on the Texas website but it is the same in both places and it is safe to assume it will be the same offer in every state. It is also important to note that Google has partnered with Intuit to make this offer to small businesses. It will actually be an Intuit website that you will get when you sign up. OK…here is the offer:

With this program, small businesses in Texas get:
A free, easy-to-build, professional website
A free customized domain name and hosting for one year
A free local business listing on Google Places
Free tools, resources, and local events

Free seems too good to be true.  What’s the catch?
What happens after the 365 days when the free offer expires?

It’s all absolutely free including the web hosting for one year. If after 365 days, you want to keep your
website hosted with Intuit, you can pay $4.99 per month for the web hosting, and $2.00 per month for your domain. These charges will be automatically billed to you, on a monthly basis, after the first year. You
may cancel at any time, and do not have to sign a contract for any period of time. Pricing based on current
Intuit Websites prices. Prices are subject to change and determined by Intuit.

Now those prices aren’t bad but let’s really dig in to this seemingly to-good-to-be-true offer. Don’t get me wrong…free is good. I am tempted to say that free is always good. But in this case, free is definitely not good. Yes, your site and hosting are free for an entire year but at the end of that year, you are left with a site that is only 3 pages and you are in a situation where you have to pay for upgrades that would come for free by using regular hosting and a content management system like WordPress.

Points 1 & 2 – Free, Easy-To-Build Website & Free Customized Domain and Hosting for One Year

The website is this offer is a 3 page website built with Intuit templates. If you visit the Intuit design gallery, there are some nice looking sites. Look closer and you realize that most of these were built by web designers. If Google and Intuit are trying to help small businesses, why put them in a position where they will need to hire a designer to get a really nice looking site?

I have never used the Intuit drag and drop system, I am sure it easy to use but I am also sure that a site built with it will not look as good as the sites in their gallery. And just 3 pages? Really? What business do you know of that have a useful site with just 3 pages. Sure, you can get more but it will cost you. Upgrading to a 10 page site is $7.99/month. Its $19.99/month if you want basic e-commerce capabilities.

While free for a year could certainly be enticing to a small business on a very tight budget the fact of the matter is that web hosting and domains really aren’t that expensive. We host GoBeyondSEO.com on Bluehost. It is about $85/year for hosting and the domain was free for the first year. That is about $7/month for a site with unlimited pages. A small business owner could then spend a weekend figuring out how to use WordPress and one of the thousands of free themes available for WordPress and will they will have a site that is leaps and bounds better than the ones Google and Intuit are offering.

For one thing, the WordPress site hosted on Bluehost will have access to unlimited email addresses. Do you need an email address like me@mydomain.com? It has been shown that using a domain based email address comes off as more professional and helps your potential customers to trust you more than using an email service like gmail, hotmail, yahoo, aol or a cable provider. It shows that you are a professional. I would recommend setting up a few domain specific email addresses.

For example, my e-mail is brian@gobeyondseo.com. Our other employees have their own personal e-mail addresses. We also have emails like info@gobeyondseo.com. You might need sales@yourdomain.com or service@yourdomian.com. No matter what you need you shouldn’t have to pay an extra fee e-mail addresses. Almost every hosting provider provides unlimited e-mails for free with the hosting.

Under the “Get Online” plan offered by Google and Intuit, you need to “upgrade” in order to get a domain specific e-mail address. I didn’t even try to dig deeper and figure out the cost of the upgrade because even just $1/month is too much. This is normally provided for free.

Also, the $2/month for your domain name is an absurd pricing model and while the gross figure of $24/year is not high, it is more than double what most competitors charge. You can grab a domain name for around $10/year on dozens of sites including GoDaddy or Namecheap. As I mentioned before, Bluehost includes them for free for the first year and they just $10/year after that. So while the small amount of $2/month looks inexpensive at first glance, it is actually more than 100% more expensive than market price.

The only reason that I can think of that would cause Google and Intuit to price this package in this manner is that they are charging some type of convenience fee. Oftentimes, when you need something quickly and conveniently, the price of that item goes up. This is true of everything from websites to your morning cup of coffee. It is a lot easier to grab a cup of Joe from a Starbucks drive through in the morning, as oppossed to grinding your own beans and brewing it at home. That is the price of convenience.

While I realize that small business owners are often short on time and convenience can be truly helpful, I don’t think establishing your online presence is something to be taken lightly or done most conveniently. You need to map out a plan and things like paying $24/year for a domain name and having to upgrade in order to have an e-mail address or more than 3 pages on your website should not be a part of this plan.

Point 3 – Free Local Business Listings on Google Places

If you have read this blog at all, you realize that we LOVE Google Places. It is the Babe Ruth of Local Directories precisely because it is Google’s. It is your Google Place Page that shows up in Google Maps results and with integrated and blended map results showing up in the universal search results, it is imperative that local businesses have a Google Place Page.

So why does Point 3 of this offer bother me so much? Because everyone gets a free local business listing on Google Places – not just Intuit customers. As a matter of fact, Google has spent millions of dollars trying to create these pages for small businesses of every kind. All you need to do is claim the page – and that is always free!

I am totally o.k. with adding value to your offer and letting prospective clients know everything you are going to provide for them. But this offer is phrased in a way that makes it seem like you get preferential treatment by signing up for this offer and that is simply not true. Don’t get me wrong, claiming and optimizing your place page is vitally important. It is just that you do not need to sign up for this Google/Intuit offer in order to do so. The online marketing space is confusing enough to small business owners, Google shouldn’t be muddying the waters with misleading statements like this.

Google is successful precisely because it has the trust of its customers. People trust Google to respond to their web search queries with relevant, trusted websites. Sites in the top listings for a keyword even enjoy some implied trust with the consumer because Google has ranked the site so high. This trust is very powerful, but it is also very fragile. I feel like Google is putting that trust on the line with this offer and it worries me.

At a time when people are nervous that Google has a monopoly on search or that ads are taking up more and more space in the results pages, Google is beginning to spend some of the trust it has banked over the years. If they continue down some of these ill-advised paths, they could lose this capital quickly.

Point 4 – Free tools, resources and local events

Google actually does a pretty good job with his point. There is a Tips and Tools tab in the navigation bar and it contains some valuable information. There is a download link to a zip file that contains documents like the “How To Guide For Getting Online” and the “Getting Online Workbook.”

I only quickly skimmed the PDF’s but they seem to contain actionable, useful online marketing educational content. Some of the authors for the guides include business online marketing heavy weights like Carrie Wilkerson, David Garland and John Jantsch. The information is targeted at small business owners who are just getting their businesses online so it is on a basic, fundamental level but still sound marketing advice.

I did find it interesting that in the Getting Online Workbook contains a blueprint to Online Success that recommends in week 3 of being online that you start a blog. I actually think this is very good advice. But starting a blog is difficult to do with a static, 3 page website. Google knows better than to draw small businesses to this offer!

I wish they partnered with a cheap hosting provider and had a WordPress template built for this offer. Instead, they decided to partner with Intuit and present these sites, which are no where near the top of the market.

The resource center also has links to Google Webmaster Central and Learn with Google. Both tools are extremely helpful for small business owners who double as their own webmasters. Webmaster Central will help you with your analytics, check links, and submit site maps – all best practices. The Learn with Google Center is still in beta but it educates small business owners on how to market effectively online and introduces them to the family of Google marketing products like Places, Adwords, Adwords express, Analytics, and Business Apps. The Center is a classic case of informing and educating a prospect in the hopes that you gain their trust and they decide to try your products.

I am a big fan of that business model. I don’t write the GoBeyond blog just because I like to. I hope that it will help me expand my business. Google normally pulls this relationship off very well. As a member of the Google Engage Program, I have witnessed Google providing “free” education in the hopes of selling you on a product or service later on in the relationship. Because Google is so often effective at developing this relationship, it baffles me even more on why they would want to start a relationship with small business owners by making this free website offer. It is offering a website that doesn’t have the capabilities that Google itself recommends in its own Getting Online Workbook.

I just don’t get it.

The Long and Short of Google Small Business Websites

In the end, I like what Google is trying to achieve with this offer. They realize that having an online presence has become mandatory for small businesses and they want to help small businesses owners establish this presence. But Google falls short with its offer. A static 3 page website just isn’t going to help a business owner establish their online presence. And when the free year is up, all of the time and energy that went into building that presence will be wasted because the time has come to pay for that presence and this deal is not a good one. Owners will find they need to expand their presence with more pages, email addresses, a blog, etc. And there are much better tools out there with which to build this presence.

So often it is imperative that a business get the fundamentals right when they start. Establishing an online presence is one of these times. Online marketing is hard enough, needing to change web hosts or templates can be a daunting task. Business owners need a simple, elegant solution so they can concentrate on growing their business, not waste their time and money figuring out how to set up a new email address.

If you are just getting started online I would recommend an entirely different foundation than these Google small business websites. Get you domain and hosting from an inexpensive provider like Bluehost. Install the free website content management system called WordPress and build your presence from there.

You will get more features then are offered by Google/Intuit and you will also have a flexible foundation that adjusts easily to your growing businesses’ needs instead of having to start all over after your “free” is up. In business, time and energy are money and new small businesses don’t have any to waste.