Letting IT Slip Due To The Dread About The Cost Is A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Doing some IT support for a firm earlier this year, I was struck by how old some of their systems were. I first went in to fix up a printer that would not play ball with the computer that it was intended to be connected to. I managed to get it working via a back door process, but the essential problem was that the software they were running was very elderly and was having trouble trying cope with something that was far more modern.

I was back a few days later when the company owner’s computer failed quite stunningly. It took hours to repair, eventually having to have a total rebuild but we got there finally and I discovered that the position isn’t out of the ordinary. Aside from their accounting systems, they had no IT support at all which left them exposed and meant that their IT equipment had slipped increasingly out of date. And this isn’t strange with small firms in the Black Country that are so focused on their primary purpose that the support work was taken for granted.

This in itself is not a problem, you do not need to have the most modern systems, upgrading and replacing every six to twelve or even every couple of years, but operating systems and vital software should be checked for upgraded every 3 years at least. As some suppliers, partners and customers, especially the larger ones, will replace and as a matter of everyday business they will send and receive files and data and eventually, these files won’t be usable as the formats will alter. For instance, someone working with Microsoft Office from the mid to late 1990′s (and plenty are in my experience) will not manage with a file made from Office 2010 and when it does, everything to do with that partner and data will be frozen. What if it’s an invoice or a big order? That could be very costly.

The same is true of SEO for businesses who put their trade online with a dear and well designed website, which looks fantastic, behaves efficiently and is never used by people looking to buy that could be going to that firm. Let us say a Black Country steel business is in need of a new lathe and would intend to purchase from a company close by the area, but cannot find a lathe manufacturer on the internet as all their online searches produce businesses who are better optimised. Our lathe manufacturer may not even be logged with the search engines in which case the most exact search in the world is not going to display them and they might as well not have a website at all. Perhaps they know about SEO which, I will acknowledge, has a poor PR image sometimes, and they regard it as a doubtful cost. But good SEO does work, is worth the cost and how expensive is not getting that lathe order?

Small firms have to prioritise on their core business, of course they do. But they have to be kept up to date with their admin systems which means proper IT support, SEO as well as the more obvious such as anti virus software. To let them fall behind too much will eventually make the worried about expense a self-fulfilling prophecy instead of a boon to profitability.

20101103

Want to find out more about search engine optimisation, then visit the Osiris Web Services site on how to choose the best affordable SEO company

categories: SEO,Black Country