The Ball of Confusion Surrounding Small Business SEO

After doing internet marketing for small business for the last nine years, I’ve found that my clients are often confused about marketing online. And quite honestly, I can relate.

You see, ten years ago I was a small business owner who didn’t understand a thing about marketing online. However, I had a client who helped build an online community (that he and his partners later sold to Yahoo) who was constantly telling me about how the internet was taking over everything. After hearing this for months, I finally started to take notice of what he was saying.

As it turned out, it was the best thing I ever did for my businesses. I started marketing online years before most of my competitors did, and as you might guess my interest in online marketing eventually grew into a business of it’s own.

However, I still remember how overwhelming it was at first… and that was ten years ago, long before the advent of Web 2.0 (basically, interactive websites) and social media. The landscape of the internet was much flatter back then, and easier to understand by several degrees.

I can only imagine how confusing all this must be for a small business owner today. Blogging, social networking, Twitter, Facebook, web video, podcasting, SEO, SEM… There’s so much more to think about than just getting your home page ranked in Google.

So, where do you start?

Simplified Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

If you’re confused about where to start with your online marketing, never fear. Here’s a quick breakdown in four simple steps outlining what you should do first to market your business locally online:

1. Obviously, internet marketing for small business starts with getting a website. Well, duh. However obvious this may seem, there are a few things worth considering before building your first website. Most importantly, you need to decide what type of website is best for your business (static, CMS, ecommerce, or blog). In most cases I recommend starting with a blog, since anyone can start one relatively easily and inexpensively. (And rather than staying victim to paralysis by analysis, doing any online marketing activity is better than none.) So if you’re not sure what to do first just start a blog about your business. Then, begin posting articles, news, and videos about what you do and how your products and services can benefit customers in your local market.
2. The next step is on-page optimization of your site. That means doing all the basic stuff necessary to make your site as “search engine friendly” as possible. At the very minimum this should include optimizing your title tags and meta tags for each of your main pages, optimizing your navigation, and creating an XML site map for your site.
3. After you optimize your site, it’s time to start driving traffic to your site. Don’t worry about submitting your site to the search engines, because what you do in this step will typically get your site crawled (seen) and indexed (listed or included in their database) by the major search engines (like Google, Yahoo, and Bing) in relatively short order. The best way to do that is to start getting links to your site from other sites. The best sites to get links from are sites that are relevant to yours; in other words, sites that are topically related. So, if you’re a dentist, you would want to get links from other sites that were about dentistry. Likewise, a mechanic would want to get links from sites about auto repair and automotive topics. There’s not enough space here to talk about all the ways to do this, but a good small business marketing consultant can help you out here (and I’ll post more on this in future articles).
4. The next step in the process is to evaluate how well your site is doing it’s job. Namely, that would be how well it’s doing at getting you leads and sales. 90% of the time, small businesses are looking to get immediate sales from their sites, and that’s typically a mistake. What you should be looking for instead is getting leads from your site, in the form of phone calls or (even better) collecting contact information (name, email address, and in certain cases a phone number). Why is it better to collect contact info than to just get calls? For one, if you have a prospective client’s contact information, you can continue to market your services to them over and over until they make a purchase. The best way to do this is by providing them with useful information that helps them in some way; I prefer to use email newsletters for this purpose. So, make sure your site collects leads from your visitors, and continually find ways to improve how efficient and effective your site is in doing so.

And that, in a nutshell, is what every small business owner needs to do to market their business online. Let’s recap those four steps:

Step #1 – Get a site -

Step #2 – Make that site search engine friendly -

Step #3 – Drive traffic to that site -

Step #4 – Make your site a lead generation machine -

There you have it – internet marketing for small business, simplified.

—

• Next Entry: Why SEO Is A Moving Target