The Internet and the technology behind it is constantly expanding at a rapid rate. Having a website simply because everyone else is getting one is no longer the reason to develop your own. Companies and organizations are using their websites to expand their influence online using their own website, social media, video, and other expanding mediums to get their message out.
There has been an SEO service scam going on for well over a year now that I have noticed. It doesn’t seem to be going away, so this post is to educate business owners and non-profit organizations that have a presence online and need to do something about search engine optimization regarding their website, but are not sure how to move forward knowing they are making the right decision. After all, money doesn’t come cheap these days, and you want to make good decisions with your advertising budget.
SEO, search engine optimization and Internet marketing…all of these terms are now common place terms with business owners that know nothing about any of it. They just know that they need it if they’re going to expand their business online and generate more leads and sales from their website(s), which is exactly what their website should be doing—working for you while you focus on the important operational aspects of your organization. Search engine optimization and Internet marketing are tasks best handled by a professional or by a team of professionals.
In the last year, here in Tulsa, WalMart has been moving some stuff around. Okay, they’ve moved everything around! The entire layout of the store has changed. The groceries are still on the same side and the retail remains on the left side of the store, but all of the isles are different. You could almost feel the frustration in everyone’s tone while they searched isles and couldn’t find what they were looking for. WalMart had a reason for doing what they did — I hope! I can only imagine how much time and research dollars went into setting new goals, testing and exploring new layouts
Why do you have a website? If your primary reason for having a website is simply because your competitors have a website and you feel like not having one will hurt your business, then I’m willing to bet that you haven’t updated your website in weeks or even months. Mr. Business Owner, this is doing you more harm than good. Your website is a sales tool, and quite frankly, one of the most powerful ones that you’ll ever have. Gone are the days of having a website and not updating it for weeks and months. Not OKAY! You may not see this because you are still thinking about the good ‘old days of direct mail marketing where you got a 4% return one year on a direct mail piece that you really liked.
Many small businesses do not have an advertising budget for what I believe to be a few reasons. It’s not that they don’t advertise, but they just don’t know how much they should spend on advertising and online marketing. The sad truth is that in order to go from a small business to a medium sized business, you’ve got to have some knowledge of these things. In order for you to be a successful medium size business that outperforms your competitors, you’ve got to know exactly how much you can spend, and how much you should spend.
I must admit that I was slow to jump into social media. A large part of me didn’t want to reconnect with my past – I knew that if I did get into it, I would purposefully use it as a tool and not a time waster. It wasn’t long before it proved to be a very effective way for me to be in front of thousands of people that would probably never Google us or go to our website. Social media marketing is all about finding ways to bring content directly to the end user instead of finding ways to get them to search for it or solely relying upon people that would look for you anyway.
I’m currently reading a book entitled The New Rules of Marketing and PR that my friend and local business owner Brad Johnson of Lawn America loaned to me. It’s quite good! I came across a story about a company that we all know and can identify with, and I found it relevant to many of the business owners that I speak to every week. So, I thought I’d share…
Century 21 Real Estate LLC is the franchisor of the world’s largest residential real estate sales organization, an industry giant comprising approx. 8,000 offices in 45 countries. You’ve seen Century 21’s TV ads before, but you haven’t seen them lately. In 2009, the company pulled its national TV advertising and invested those resources into online marketing. That’s a huge move considering the amount of TV they were doing. Read more
Gone are the days of the homepage. True, every website has one, but the days when website owners expect their homepage to do all the heavy lifting are gone.
Thanks to the evolving science of search, the search engines have made our lives easier by providing the consumer with relevant search results for specific keyword queries. Visitors now stream directly into websites via side doors and back doors. They can magically teleport into a website without ever seeing the homepage; they are practically flying through the windows to land directly where they want to be.
For a consumer looking for a specific product or service, this is fantastic, but for site owners and operators, the importance of optimizing each and every individual page you would potentially want a searcher to visit is magnified considerably. When visitors can enter a site and land anywhere, there are brand implications. If it’s not immediately apparent where they are, and why, they might not stick around. The same thought and energy you put into the homepage of the site to brand the product or company must be put into each page that you intend to be searchable for the consumers that you want to be on your site. Read more
Social media has its place, but does that place include replacing our most beloved forms of digital communication: e-mail?
1. Never underestimate the power of the hand-written note or letter. Test this in your work place. Put up a memo in your office, and write something in your own handwriting in red that says, “the power of the hand-written note reaches more people than a typed letter with the most impressive grammar.” I promise they will glance down at the bottom to read the handwriting before the read the first word of the memo. They’ll get the point.
2. Nearly all sites on the web that require registration require an email address. Some are starting to integrate social media into this process (such as Facebook Connect), but that is still a very small fraction, and they typically still allow for email information as well. Read more
