Because of the economy, more and more businesses are looking for ways to market themselves. The ‘good years’ in the past are dwindling away as consumers tighten up their budgets and shut down their checkbooks. Because of this, businesses are needing more and more to get in front of customers.
I talked to one business owner today who builds inground pools in the Saint Louis area. For years his business has flourished. Last year he had to add staff and purchase more vehicles to keep up with all the work.
This year, however, everything has ‘dried up’. He’s having a hard time paying bills, especially new trucks and maintenace. No one is buying homes, which means no one is spending on upgrades like pools. So he’s checking into running a special in the local newspaper promoting a sale which he won’t make hardly anything off of. Just to get his name out there, and to stay in business.
If you aren’t marketing your business now, you’re in for a shitload of trouble (pardon my French) when the market does turn around. Those that took this time to start putting money into their Internet marketing are going to be so far ahead of the curve as the economy creeps back up that they won’t be able to catch up.
So, with all that said, here’s a question for you business owners: Would you pay for a one-day seminar that taught you the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and also exposed you to some other marketing ideas, such as video marketing, email and direct markeitng, and maybe even something on website maintenance? Would you pay $299? $199? $99? $69?
What would it be worth to you to gain a HUGE amount of information about Internet Marketing for your business at a one-day seminar catered to your needs?
I’m still surprised at the amount of people that continue to use Google’s pagerank as a means to judge their website. It’s surprising to see all kinds of websites listed for sale, and one of the main ‘benefits’ the seller menitons is the pagerank.
Let’s be honest. Pagerank is nice. Its fun to watch the little green bar grow as your website gets older. The further it climbs, the more your ego swells. But does that little green bar pay any of your bills?
Consider this: If you build a website full of rich information that helps your customer base, and you are a pagerank of zero, does that mean your website is useless?
Google makes major updates to their pagerank only about 3-4 times a year. That means you could literally have a good quality website with a PR of zero for several months.
On the other hand, if you’re a good blackhat, you can swell up that pagerank number to a number higher than what it should be through manipulation of links, etc. These are usually the people that are building and selling websites by referencing the PR. It’s inflated, and they are demanding a price higher than the real website’s value. Tsk, tsk.
I think the little green bar is fun to watch, but I wouldn’t put too much value in it. If you are a business owner, and are watching for that to grow, quit wasting your time and invest it into a profitable link building plan or SEO campaign. Provide quality content and the customers will come.
After all, customers are the ones with the real green.
Yesterday I offered 449 entrepreneurs in the Saint Louis area an opportunity to promote their business, show off their subject-matter-expertness and even get a free link back to their business website. I offered all of this for free, in exchange for a simple article (in which they could also promote their business).
The offer went straight to all 449 InBoxes, so I can safety assume that at least 85% of them were delivered successfully. In fact, meetup.com probably has bounce measures in place to weed out the false members, so it’s possible that 100% of the members received my offer.
Yet not one took me up on it.
Not one of 449 entrepreneurs took advantage of a great marketing opportunity. Why? Could it be because they thought they’d be helping my client and not themselves? Perhaps. Could it be because they didn’t understand what I was asking for? Perhaps.
But I think the answer is quite simple. Small business owners still don’t understand the power of marketing on the Internet. Not even close.
Two years ago I was hired by a local retail mattress store. They had a website that wasn’t the greatest, and they were paying AT&T an outageous amount of money for traffic and marketing. Yet their website wasn’t selling a damn thing. It wasn’t generating leads, it wasn’t producing revenue, it was simply a train wreck.
It wasn’t necessarily their fault. As with most SMB owners, when a big company like AT&T comes in, they may be overwhelmed with the statistics that are thrown at them. They are promised ‘online marketing’ and ‘traffic’ with great generality and glazing over of details. What kind of marketing? What kind of traffic? They don’t know to ask, and they don’t even know what answer is the correct one.
On top of this, SMB owners aren’t web designers. They are given archaic tools and expected to produce a customer-friendly website. They aren’t given guidance, they aren’t even told how to create a simple contact form. So it’s no wonder the money goes down the drain. And most SMBs don’t exactly have money to just throw down the marketing drain.
Shortly after I was hired, we started rebuilding their entire website. They weened off the phone book ads one at a time, canceled AT&T’s “marketing” and put all their efforts into the web. It’s a good thing, too, as the business was slowly going downhill. Downhill to the point that had they not made this bold move, they’d probably be out of business today. (And this isn’t just me bragging, you can ask Doug yourself)
Once we launched the newly designed site, a (not so) amazing thing happened. They started ranking. They started getting quality traffic. People started calling. Customers started asking for prices and delivery. Their website was actually generating a decent ROI.
Over time, you’ll learn that one of the best things you can do for a website is to provide new and relevant content often. Search engines love the content, and if it’s on target with your industry, you’ll start to see rankings for long tail searches you never thought would bring you traffic (and sales!). Providing this content gets more and more difficult over time, as you start to run out of things to say.
Now, my client still has plenty of content ammunition. But he also knows that there are things that he doesn’t know, that are related to his industry, but he doesn’t know. And these things are just what I was asking other SMB owners to write about. But they didn’t. Why?
The other huge part of getting more traffic to your website is links. And in particular, links from industry-related websites are great ways to improve your over SERP rankings. So writing an article for another website, that is willing to link back to yours, is an awesome opportunity. One that 449 St. Louis entrepreneurs missed.
Today Google released a new tool called SearchWiki, which allows users to modify the organic results they see for some phrases. The users, when logged in, can now ‘vote up’ or ‘vote down’ results when they do a search on the popular search engine’s website.
How will this affect SEO?
Personally I think it’ll have a bigger effect on very large and high-volume websites such as travel sites, news sites, etc. Smaller-trafficked websites probably won’t see much of a change IMO.
Look at it this way. If you are creating quality content for your customers, and you are doing it all honestly, not spamming, not keyword stuffing, not cloaking, etc, you’ll probably be fine. People will come to your website, see what they were looking for, and have no reason to vote you down.
If, on the other hand, you’re running an affiliate poker or viagra website, be prepared to see your rankings tumble for these custom users. That is, unless you’re providing quality content. Have I mentioned quality content yet?
Keep in mind that at this time, Google is not using these modifications for their ‘normal’ search that John Doe off the street would use. This only changes the results if you are logged into your Google account, and you do a search. Voting up your favorite websites won’t affect the overall organic results (at this time, according to G), so don’t waste time voting up your own website to the top of every possible keyword. You’ll just have skewed results that you can then fool yourself into believing are really organic.
While some people are saying this will have a major impact on search overall, I don’t see it happening yet. Now, will Google at some point take this data and use it towards their algorithm? Very possible. We’ll have to wait and see.
Many many websites are built as what I like to call ‘brochure sites’. I would venture a guess that 80%+ of websites for small businesses are this way, or at least initially started this way.
Somewhere along the line someone mentioned to a business owner that they needed to get online. Having no idea what that meant, and most likely gaining bits and pieces of info from their business friends, they bought a domain and put up a brochure site.
A brochure website has simple business information. Usually these websites are just a few pages; home, contact, a services/products page and maybe an ‘About Us’ page. These websites are so 1998.
A good website now needs to not only list all your products and services individually, but it needs to engage the (already interested) visitor. If you don’t have a call to action on every product page, you could be missing out on very warm leads.
For a long time I’ve read that there is a difference in how search engines see and index filenames and URLs that contain dashes or underscores. For a long time the general concensus has been that the search engines consider a dash to be simliar to a space, whereas they consider an underscore as no space. If that’s true, then your new page called will_hanke_wins_lottery.htm is going to rank as willhankewinslottery. Had you named it will-hanke-wins-lottery.htm then you’d theoretically have a better chance at ranking for a mixture of those individual words.
But c’mon, do you really believe that with all those algorithm nerds in California can’t figure out how to differentiate between a dash and an underscore?
The readers who frequent this blog often know I’m a big fan of Google Alerts, and I use it often to build links and keep track of a few other things. Google Alerts is a free service from Google that emails you whenever something new has shown up on the Internets with a search query you’ve specified.
Since I’m sitting on an SEO panel tonight covering blogging, splogging and SEO, I thought I’d post a quick little ditty that you can do to keep track of who’s stealing your content (without permission).
When you blog, there are certain things that you have control over, besides the ‘meat’ of the post. For most blogging software, you can modify other things, such as posted-by, date formatting and tagging. Somewhere you need to find something that you can make unique to your blog – a phrase, a set of random numbers, or a weird tag. For this example I’ll use a number/letter combo: 68wcrada72
Once you’ve decided on something, make sure you incorporate it into every post as you write (as I just did).
Then head over to Google Alerts and set up your trap.
(Click to see larger image)
Make sure you add the -domain.com or else you’ll get an alert every time you post.
Now when someone steals your content and posts it on their website, you’ll get an email showing you the link to the splog. Take appropriate action – ask the author to take down your content. If they don’t, or won’t answer, take further steps such as flagging inappropriate/spam posts on Blogger or reporting the splog to WHOIS (if appropriate).
People are out there to steal your content. Since we can’t stop a copy/paste, at least we can still keep tabs on what’s happening. Don’t let people use your content freely!
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Will Hanke is part husband, father, geek and all kickass SEO. Follow on Twitter or stalk elsewhere.
