It’s A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy To Let A Business’s Computer Systems To Slip

Doing some IT support for a business earlier this year, I was struck by how old a few of their systems were. I originally went in to load up a printer that wouldn’t cooperate with the computer that it was supposed to be connected to. I managed to get it sorted by finding a back door route, but the fundamental problem was that the software they were running was rather outdated and was having trouble trying cope with something that was far more sophisticated.

I was called back a few days later when the firm owner’s pc failed quite dramatically. It took ages to fix, eventually needing a total rebuild but we got there eventually and I discovered that the situation isn’t unusual. Apart from their accounting programs, they had no IT support at all which left them exposed and meant that their computer equipment had become more and more out of date. And this isn’t unusual with smaller firms in the Black Country that are so focused on their prime function that the support work was taken for granted.

This in itself is fine, you don’t have to have the most recent systems, upgrading and replacing every 6-12 months or even every couple of years, but operating systems and vital software should be upgraded every 3 years at the most. As some suppliers, partners and customers, particularly the bigger ones, will replace and as a matter of course they will send and receive files and data and sooner or later, these files won’t be usable as the formats will change. For instance, someone operating Microsoft Office from the mid to late nineteen ninties (and many are in my experience) will not manage with a file transmitted from Office 2010 and when it does, everything concerning that partner and work will come to a halt. What if it’s an invoice or a big order? That could be very costly.

The same is true of SEO for firms who put their business online with a costly and well constructed website, which looks great, behaves well and is scarcely visited by buyers looking to buy that could be going to that firm. Let us say a Black Country steel company requires a new lathe and would like to purchase from a company in the district, but cannot find a lathe manufacturer on the internet because all their online searches come up with companies who are better optimised. Our lathe maker may not even be registered with the search engines in which case the most exact search in the world is not going to locate them and they might as well not bother with a website at all. Perhaps they have heard of SEO which, I will confess, has a poor PR image sometimes, and they view it as a doubtful cost. But proper SEO does work, is worth the outlay and how hard is not securing that lathe order?

Small firms have to focus on their primary business, of course they do. But they should be kept up to date with their back office 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 one day make the feared expense a self-fulfilling prophecy instead of a help to profitability.

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categories: SEO,Black Country