Blog

As a small business owner, getting new customers is tougher than ever. We do our best to give the very best service to our clients in the hope that we will get referrals from word of mouth. But is it enough? I have seen some businesses with the hardest working owners giving the best service they can, only to close shop or see their competitors with less service be successful. How can that happen? Word of mouth is the best marketing, but how are the competitors getting more business?

Today 97% of consumers look up businesses online. That is an astounding statistic. If you are not on the Internet or not being seen, then that is why your competitors are getting the business even if they have lesser service than you. Academic researchers have found that 91% of people never make it to the 2^nd page. Digital Marketing or Internet Marketing has become one of the most critical partners businesses can use to help their business grow.

There are some easy steps that you can take to help get you higher in your rankings and drive business to your door. Just having a website will not help get you business. You need to be seen in multiple places and have a high page ranking with the search engines.

The first step is to make sure your website is optimized for the search engines and using WordPress. WordPress is an open source website creation tool. It is probably the easiest to use and the most powerful blogging and website content management tool out there. This makes extremely friendly to search engines and you don’t have to be an HTML expert.

Using Dashboards and Analytics

Local SEO strategies can be ever changing and somewhat a little confusing, especially with Google’s pigeon algorithm. However there are some things that you can do. It starts by making a local page on the 3 major search engines. You can visit Bing Yahoo and Google and put in all your information on your business. You want to try and complete it as much as possible then manage the dashboards of all three.

Getting your business listed on these major sites is very critical. That is why several companies go on a link building campaign. However, if you get listed everywhere and wrong site, it could actually lower your page ranking or worse blacklist you. Make sure your links are from reputable sources. Also if your business is not categorized correctly, some search engines may not display your listing.

Once these strategies are done, that doesn’t mean you will be on page one and your done. However, this will certainly get you the map and much further than most. There are a lot of strategies and the algorithms change all the time. Taking these steps will make you much more visible and get the attention of customers.

If you have a business, website, online store or blog, SEO is essential to help your business grow and meet it’s business objectives. If you are not using Search engine optimization or SEO your competitors will. To sum it up, SEO is the best way to drive more customers to your door, increase sales and meet or exceed business goals.

Author: Frank Redavide