Tomorrow Chancellor George Osborne will deliver his first March Budget to outline the government’s spending plans for the next financial year. A lot of the focus of the Budget is likely to be around fuel duty and interest rates, but Prime Minister David Cameron has also promised that the Budget will: “tear down the barriers to enterprise,” providing help for business start ups and young entrepreneurs.

Online interest in starting a new business has grown quite considerably over the last three years, with searches for all terms relating to business start ups increasing by 63% since March 2008.

You can see from the chart above that searches have dropped off a little in the last couple of weeks, but that is to be expected in the run up to the Budget. If Mr Cameron comes good on his promise to back new businesses on Wednesday, we would expect searches to increase significantly next week after the Budget. It is also worth noting that the January peak for business start up searches in 2011 was the highest it has ever been, and 6% more than the January peak in 2010.
When people are searching online for information about starting up a new business the searches generally fall into two categories. The first type of search is for practical information and advice about how to set up a new business, whereas the second type of query concerns how to get funding or grants for a new business.
Looking at the most popular terms relating to business start ups over the last 12 weeks you can see that four of the top 10 search terms concern grants. In total 15.5% of all searches in this area contain the word ‘grant’, which shows how reliant many new entrepreneurs are on funding assistance from the government.

The downstream traffic from searches for starting a new business reveals some interesting insights. Firstly, there are three main authorities online for information on how to start a new business: Business Link, Startups.co.uk and Smallbusiness.co.uk which together account for over 25% of all search clicks for searches for starting a new business.

Secondly, when people are looking for a grant to start their new venture HM Revenue and Customs is the top recipient of traffic. The ninth biggest recipient of traffic from new business search terms in the last 12 weeks was Get British Businesses Online (www.gbbo.co.uk), a free service which helps new start ups create a business website and the only website in the top 10 recipients to receive a significant proportion of its traffic from paid links.
So what kind of people are the budding millionaire business tycoons of the future? Mosaic data reveals the type of UK Internet users that visit the business start up websites like Business Link and Startups.co.uk.

The results from the Mosaic analysis show that the spread of visits to business start up websites is fairly uniform across all groups, with very few groups deviating significantly from the average Index score of 100. One group that did stand out as punching above its weight was Rural Solitude. This Mosaic group accounted for 5.71% of all visits to business start up information sites, a much higher proportion that expected given the size of this group online.
Rural Solitude represents people of variable affluence who tend to live in the country, in coastal towns or on the outskirts of cities like Bath, Exeter and Shrewsbury. What’s interesting about this is that the people most interested in starting new businesses are not in big urban areas but are small businesses focusing on tourism and retail.
To finish today’s blog, it’s pop quiz time: Per head of population, which part of the UK has the most budding new entrepreneurs online? Answer: Huddersfield. Impress your friends with that little gem down the pub.
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