Today I wondered who owns “smallbusiness.ca”. When I typed the URL into my browser, up popped the home page of small-business accounting firm BDO Dunwoody Canada. It looks like they registered the name in October 2000 (back when most organizations could only get one dot-ca registration each), so good on them for clearly communicating their market positioning over the long term.
But why, I wonder, don’t they make something more of this?
When you type in http://www.smallbusiness.ca/, you come to the same home page you would if you’d typed “www.bdo.ca.” There’s nothing special to explain why BDO secured the smallbusiness.ca address. There’s nothing that addresses the likelihood that whoever lands on this page wasn’t looking for an accounting firm.
Why not give visitors a landing page worthy of the initiative they’ve shown? Congratulate them on their cleverness in finding BDO, since the firm is so committed to the small-business market, and its website contains so many useful features for entrepreneurs. Then help users find them.
And then, in case BDO doesn’t have what the visitor is looking for, why wouldn’t they offer “Other Links” to alternative Canadian small-business resources? There’s About.com’s small business section, Strategis, PROFIT or Canadian Business magazines, the Globe’s Report on Small Business section, the CFIB, Enterprise Magazine, the Canada Business Service Centres, CanadaOne – and so on.
Business owners are always looking for an edge. Connect them to a useful resource they didn’t know about before, and they’ll be your friend for life. Or at least a few weeks.
BDO took a visionary step in securing the smallbusiness.ca address. Now it needs to show some imagination to prove that vision was no fluke.
1 comment:
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