<p>Eyeing to help Small and Medium enterprises (SME) scale up their business online, Google India, on Wednesday announced launching of new initiative, targeted towards SME, in Punjab.
Nikhil Rungta, country marketing head, Google India maintained the program ‘India Get Your Business Online’, is aimed at helping Small and medium business houses grow business online.
Google India would be organising road shows across the country to sensitise SMEs on how the programme could benefit them. Google India is eyeing 5mn business houses go online by 2012.
As per estimates, there are over 30-35 million SMEs in India with 8 million SME having potential to do online business.
However, only four lakh SMEs have websites. With just 5 per cent SMEs having online presence, Google India is focusing on the rest 95 per cent and trying to scale their business via online mode.
In an survey conducted by Google India to identify the challenges SMB were facing while going online, it was found that most SME find it tough to make website and find its hosting expensive also.
Hence Google India under its program ‘India Get Your Business Online’ is trying to help small business houses get free website with free hosting for one year . The company also engages partner agencies to help business houses run campaign using Google advertising platform, Google Adworlds.
As per Google India local business search on Google India has been growing at 140% while search over mobile phones have grown over 500% y-o-y.
