A Small Business SEO guide that’s simple

Welcome to our guide to doing small business SEO in a big way.

Though in many respects, the rules underpinning SEO are the same regardless of the size of your enterprise. However, your priorities will be very different as a small business. In this post, we’ll be taking a look at how you can focus on three core areas for small business SEO success.

As a small business competing online, it is essential that the content on your site offers something unique to your customer. If you are offering a general approach to selling a product or service that your customer could find elsewhere, then why wouldn’t they? Be sure to research your competition. But remember, nobody is in a better position to know your audience than you.

Secondly, and this point is rarely stressed, you must have a clinical approach to your website back-end. The back-end of your website is the admin portal where your website design and content is put together. It’s also a place where a great deal of organizing can be done (or not). Though your visitors will never see your back-end, they will see traces of it. For example, what your visitor sees on the search engine as the meta title and meta description of your page. Your back-end is also crawled by search engine bots, and this is why an organized website is a fantastic SEO tool in itself.

Simple design
Last but not least, a simple website design ticks many boxes for small business SEO. Firstly, simple design looks professional and makes a good first impression. Secondly, simple design allows your audience to focus on what’s most important, the content! Third, the more simple your design, the more quickly your site can run. Four, a simple design is inexpensive and easy to maintain. Sounds good, right?

Suitable practices for small business SEO

While in many respects, the similarities outweigh the differences for big business and small business SEO, there are some practices which lend themselves particularly well to small businesses.

The main criteria that these SEO practices share is that they are all:

• Affordable
• Practical
• Effective
• Simple to maintain

Blog
Having a custom blog built for your website is a truly unique SEO method which meets all of our criteria above while offering a completely unique addition to your website. Your blog is a place to offer unique content or to give additional info that expands upon your main content for those looking to learn more. Better yet, your blog is a place where you can build a community around your brand.

Keyword Research
Next up on our list is keyword research. Your SEO professional will research the most effective keywords for each page of your website, allowing you to connect better with your audience, and ranking you better with search engines. Once again, keyword research is excellent value for money, and one of the most effective SEO methods in the book.

Simple design
A clean, minimal, professional design is a top trick for eliminating any ideas of expensive and difficult to build websites. If your business / website is small, then focus your main menu on a handful of points, and ensure that your pages from there are connected in a clear and simple way. You should also keep a home page icon available from every page.

Backlinks
Last on our list of small business SEO techniques are backlinks. Backlinks are hyperlinks that connect content on your web page to another associated site. Backlinks can be used to prove a point, to expand upon the subject, to offer similar related websites, or for any other of a myriad of reasons. Backlinks are incredibly simple to use, and they work by helping search engine crawlers to contextualize your content within the wider web of the internet.

Creating your small business SEO campaign

It can be tricky to work out where to start when creating a small business SEO campaign. You’re unlikely to have a dedicated department of experts, and you might not necessarily have the technical understanding to know your way around SEO.

With a few simple fundamental building blocks though (all of which are affordable if not free) you can have a solid long-term SEO campaign in place.

Firstly just take a look at your website and be critical. What are the current design flaws? How could navigation around your site, both for your visitors and search engine crawlers, be tidied up for a more smooth experience? How are your pages formatted? Are they consistent? and make sure they’re easy on the eye.

There is plenty a small business can do to improve the standard of it’s website without spending a fortune. Some other design related tips could be use simple or subtle colour schemes, and don’t use too much media.

One investment that is absolutely essential, at least it’s absolutely worthwhile to any small business is mobile / responsive design. I’m sure by now you may have heard that more than half of all web browsing is done on mobile devices, and it just seems an enormous waste to abandon that huge segment of your audience.

Another great basic tip for small business SEO campaigns is to look at what your competition are doing. Every industry has its own way of using the web, and looking for trends in how your competition set up their websites can give you some useful pointers.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, you need to focus hard on your content. Most small businesses had fairly static content, meaning that the information you put on it stays on the website for a long time. If this is the case it’s particularly important, but for all websites content needs to be one of your core priorities as it will largely determine your online success and popularity.

The most effective and affordable small business SEO tricks

If you’re considering making the investment in an SEO specialist to help to bring your online business up to scratch then it’s handy to know what you’ll get in return for your investment.

There are plenty of different packages out there offered by different firms, and many will give you a unique quote specifically for your business’ needs. Here are some of the main basic small business SEO techniques which most websites can benefit from though.

– be design savvy

One of the biggest turn offs for visitors to your website is a poor or over complicated website design. If your site is packed with menus on every margin, pop ups for joining newsletters, and bright colours everywhere then your user will quickly get fed up.

The best way to keep your user happy is with a clean, simple, easy to navigate website. Try to do away with unnecessary multimedia, especially anything that is on auto play.

– design for mobile

In the past few years web browsing on a desktop device has been overtaken by mobile browsing for the first time. This is certainly one of the major trends of the decade, and the importance of browsing and shopping online is only likely to move more in this direction.

Designing your website so that it can be viewed across devices with different screen sizes is called responsive design, and it’s so important today because users browse with different mobile phones, tablet devices, as well as traditional desktop screens. Missing responsive design means missing big chunks of your possible audience.

– long-tail keywords

The traditional tactic for using keywords involved trying to monopolise on the most popular keywords for your industry, today though things are a little more subtle. By researching longer, more specific key phrases you can bottleneck the most relevant searchers toward your individual pages.

– quality backlinks

Finally your web developer will work on building long-term high quality Backlinks with websites which will in time become your partners if things work well. The way this works is that if your business fixes bicycles, you will link relevant pages of your site to bike providers and so on, extending the usefulness of your site for your customers, through other websites.

Small Business SEO: Content Marketing for the Little Guy

Modern off-page SEO is all about two things: content marketing and public relations. Yes, there are still quite a few companies out there who are trying to sell their clients on outdated practices like directory listings, Web 2.0 sites, and other cheap hand-made links but quite frankly, they’re wasting their time and their clients’ money. Google has made it perfectly clear that they expect two things from their top rankers:

• An absolutely sterling web page with unique content and a solid user experience that gets visitors to stick around, and
• Links from authoritative, currently-relevant pages that are earned rather than built.

If you want to earn links, you have two options: you can build relationships with people who run authoritative websites and talk them into linking to you, or you can be an amazing content marker. In other words, you can create content so good that authoritative, relevant sites link to you because they want to.

How Can My Business Earn That Kind of Attention? It’s Boring!

First of all, if you think your business is boring, what are you doing in that business? But without getting into existential issues, quite simply, you’re wrong. If there are authoritative, currently-relevant sites about your industry, then by definition, there is someone out there that is interested enough in your industry that you might be able to get their attention.

For example, let’s take a somewhat obscure area of business: say you make those big rubber blades that mining operations use to clean off their conveyor belts, so they don’t carry debris back into the mine. You might think, “Wow, what I do is profitable, but honestly, there isn’t a soul in the world who cares enough about conveyor belt cleaning blades to read anything I might write about them.”

Wrong! All you have to do is go to Google and type conveyor belt cleaning blades inurl:blog.  That last bit tells Google to only return results that have the word ‘blog’ in the URL, so you can be fairly assured you’re only going to get blog posts as results. And look at the results! 140,000 of them! And 7 of the first 10 are from different websites, with the last three being from the same single site.

That tells you right off the bat that yes, there are people out there who care about your industry. More importantly, it tells you which sites to pay special attention to — click through them, see what kinds of things they’re most interested in. See if they have any questions you might be able to answer, or any problems you might be able to solve. Write about them. Link to them when you do. Mention them on Facebook and Twitter from your business account.

Chances are pretty good that if you create content that they find genuinely interesting and useful, you can get that backlink you’ve been looking for — and especially for a more obscure industry, every backlink you earn is a huge bump to your small business’ SEO. Target a few of the top sites, write content that will get you their nod, and reap the rewards!

Small Business SEO Is Crucial For Success

Even if you are thinking that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not important for your business, or investing in it is pointless, because of the size of your company; you are wrong. It doesn’t matter what size your company is because what it really comes down to is to whether you will have an online presence at all or not.  Small business SEO is crucial for your online success, since without it your website will not be ranked nor found when a user is using search engine to find a business or shop like yours.

Parts and Pieces

SEO is not just an acronym or something you paste or post on your site, it is a process and a design requirement as well so here are some of the things your hired SEO professional should be doing:

• Finding the appropriate keywords and locating them in your sites articles, headers, labels and tags, while keeping in mind usability and functionality without undermining readability.
• Improving your website’s loading time so that your visitors don’t go away before they can actually read or interact with your content. Users don’t have patience and you will have to take this into account.
• Measuring the Return on Investment of your economic efforts in order to know if the campaigns are really driving traffic to your website or not in order to fix whatever it is that can be better.
• Researching your websites reputation is also something else SEO experts can do. It is very important that your site is reputable and credible.

Benefiting From the Experience

The true way to benefit from small business SEO, managed by a professional is the capability to analyze the information that you are not being able to see at the moment in order to make your audience bigger and bigger. Once you have achieved that it is only a matter of time until visitors become customers and customers turns your business upside down with orders  which means money in the bank!

So let’s just say it again: your business size does not matter when trying to sell online or have an online presence. What matters is the layout, keywording and configuration of your site in order to rank high up on search engine’s search results.

Finding the Best Company for Small Business SEO

If you are looking for a SEO company online, this can be very tough. However, what is even tougher is finding a company that carries out small business SEO. Read on and discover how you can find the best SEO Company for your small business needs.

Transparency

When you are searching for a company that does small business SEO, you will want it to be as transparent as possible. What this means is you will want to know every little thing they do as well as the types of links they are building to your site. If the company fails to show exactly where they are building links, chances are they are using a gray hat technique of SEO. The disadvantage of this is your site will not gain its ranking amongst search engines and may even get penalized or suspended.

Guarantee

Another thing you must ensure is the company you choose gives you a guarantee. The majority of companies do not offer guarantees due to the reason they do not know how long it will take for your site ranking. However, some companies do offer guarantees regardless of any future changes to SEO and Google.

Affordable Pricing

The majority of companies can charge up to $100 dollars an hour. This price is ridiculous when you look at the amount of work that is achieved in the time. You need to look for a company that does not charge per hour, but per ranking. This can also be referred to as pay per performance SEO, which means you only pay when your site is ranking. Good companies will never make you pay until your site reaches the top amongst the first page, which is why you should not choose a company that has you paying regardless whether your site is ranking or not.

One thing you may like to do is look for a company that deals only with small businesses. Companies like this will have much more experience working with smaller campaigns and local SEO. One thing you should not do is hire a large company for your small business SEO. This is because they will charge much more than those that specifically fit the purpose.

All about Small Business SEO (Off-Page Optimization)

Off-page optimization consists of optimizing your website through producing good credentials from related websites that are in your niche. A part of big and small business SEO strategy is off-page optimization for all websites. It is an important technique that is applied after on-page optimization. Off-page optimization doesn’t have anything to do with the content on your site, unlike on-page optimization, which does. Off-page optimization is not so easy to implement, which is why you need to form a relationship with other sites to give a link to your site or you need to publish content. The linking process is important and is known as link building and if you build links with other sites, this helps to drive targeted traffic to your site, improves your site’s indexing, and also improves the ranking of your website. Listed below are different methods of off-page optimization:

Article, Blog and DirectorySubmission
Creating content with the keywords that relate to your service and products and posting the content in well-known article submission sites provides backlinks to your website. Sites include GoArticles, EzineArticles, Buzzle, etc. You need to be creating blogs with updated information on your website, which needs to be unique and relevant in transmitting the information. The blogs can then be submitted in blog search engine and blog directories. This also generates traffic to your site. You can also submit your site in well-known directories like Zoominfo, Yahoo, DMOZ and Pegasus, etc. in order to get backlinks.

Social Bookmarking and Social Networking
For the off-page optimization of small business SEO you can submit links to social bookmarking sites, such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Propeller, Diigo and Delicious. You can also create a profile in a variety of social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, etc. This allows you to promote your website as well as all the latest achievements, services and products.

Press Releases and PPC Campaigns
You can also submit latest business news in press release sites. Posting your ad in desired sites where you can get appropriate clients to your business is another method.

Photo and Video Sharing and Forums
You can post images of your products on a range of photo sharing sites, such as Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, etc. Your company’s video can also be submitted in video sharing sites like YouTube. You may also create online conversation boards and start a discussion; this also helps generate traffic to your site.

Small business SEO is important and owners need to recognize the importance of off-page optimization so they can get better ranking.

Small Business SEO Guidelines

Website owners of small businesses are beginning to realize the importance of website ranking on Yahoo, Bing and Google. However, others still haven’t a clue and to them it is still a mystery, which really needs to be solved. Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO is a vital technique, which all sites require in order to be shown to customers who search with a certain keyword. SEO is also responsible for generating traffic to your site, mainly based on backlinks and using the right keywords.

SEO Tips for Small Businesses
Listed below are seven small business SEO tips, which will surely benefit small business owners by ranking their site amongst the top of search engines and by boosting the traffic.

SEO Content and Keywords
The keywords you are optimizing must be right and a tool such as Google AdWords can be used in order to help generate the correct keywords for your small business SEO. Keywords are what drive traffic to your site as the site with perfect SEO keyword optimization is likely to rank amongst the top in search engines, therefore also gets more clicks. The content on your site must be based around your keywords. It needs to be unique, high-quality and easy to read.

Mobile Friendly and Local Search
If your site is not available in a mobile format, you will be missing out on a lot. This is due to the latest technology, which has caused the majority of people to carry out searches on their personal devices, which boosts site traffic and sales. When it comes to industry-related searches, Google Places is already a default. If you become a part of the Google Pack, you will get more customers, which will boost the overall traffic.

Link Building and Official Pathway
Internal and external links are thoroughly paid attention to by search engines. In order to improve the rank your site receives on search engines, it is important for you to increase the volume of incoming links to your site. You can use blogs, directories, social media and relevant websites to build effective internal and external links. If you make a clear and accurate pathway domain, any page variation will be avoided. Duplicate content on your site is also avoided this way. If you create an alt tag with each image, this creates an extra source for keyword density. This is due to the fact that web crawlers cannot read pictures, but they can read the content on the alt tag.

Helping Small Businesses: SEO and Marketing Strategies Combined

All small business owners want the best search engine rankings on major search engine pages. Search engine optimization among other business strategies can help that happen. By using SEO properly it is very likely that you will get the results that you want. Search engine optimization focuses on using relevant keywords throughout your site. This increases rankings with major search engines and increases traffic. Also when keywords are chosen they are meant to target a specific audience, whom are more likely to become your steady customers.

Search engine optimization is extremely successful in helping small businesses grow and increase their publicity over the internet. There are also many other marketing strategies that will help business grow immensely. However the best possible strategies involve combining a few techniques. Some of them are as follows:

Pay Per Click: Pay per click, or PPC is well known for producing immediate results. Unfortunately PPC campaigns are not usually affordable to small business. SEO can be a great option if you are looking for a cheap and affordable option. What you have to do is collect information from the PPC campaign, about much needed details such as traffic numbers, keywords, and ad copy. Then you simply introduce SEO, which is leveraged with a lower cost.

Social Media: For those who don’t know, SEO and social media work very well together. Combining the two makes it possible for your business to grow through social networking and connections without having to rely completely on them. Using social media can help your business gain publicity and still use the strategic keyword placement of SEO.

Video Marketing: Videos have become a very effective marketing tool. Regrettably, due to small business’s budget, it is often difficult for them to make videos. However, sites like YouTube have made it very easy to gain publicity through video marketing. Using videos as a marketing tool can build an emotional connection with business owners and their customers. Another upside to video marketing is the message. A short video can contain the same amount of information that is in a four page paper.

Fundamentals of Small Business SEO

It can be very discouraging when you look at how many large businesses are at the top ranking of search engines. There are some common keywords that attract million dollar budgets and make it impossible to compete. This is why small business SEO is so vital, it not only needs to take into account the best practices and techniques but it also needs to target customers so that money is spent in places where it will result in more visitors and more sales.

Finding Your Niche
It is important to start with identifying your particular market niche and then targeting it aggressively. Instead of trying to compete with the heavyweights by narrowing your focus you can expend your SEO budget in a way the gets to your target audience without directly competing with the large companies.

Finding the People Ready to Buy
When you use a more focused technique you can target people that are not looking for information that may purchase a product service in the future but people that have made the decision and want to buy right now! This can be done by carefully choosing keywords and researching the market. Top SEO companies that specialize in small business SEO are experienced in using lesser keywords that are used more often when people are ready to purchase.

Multiple Keywords
A great technique that fits the model of finding niches and directly targeting them is using multiple keywords. This can involve several keywords or even hundreds of keywords depending on how large a campaign and how many niches you have identified and targeted. It is common to have several different landing pages so that visitors that are delivered by the SEO techniques are brought to a tightly focused offer page that takes advantage of their identified wish to make a purchase.

Location SEO
Using location based searches as a way to focus customers on your website and can be a helpful technique. This allows customers that are close by to find you in searches and should include local suburbs and neighboring area names so that you get the widest possible exposure when people are searching. This can be particularly good for use in new websites being built using small business SEO techniques for businesses that had previously used local directories and the yellow pages as their primary marketing tool.

Information about Small Business SEO

Search engine optimization is vitally important to small businesses because of the advantages that it can bring in traffic volume and increased sales. Small business SEO is targeted at obtaining a high page rank when certain keywords are searched so that they are visible to potential customers.

One of the ways this can be optimized is by the use of a quality links that are seen by search engines such as Google as a positive indicator. The term page rank is commonly thought of as a score of a web-page but in fact is a ranking system that was created by Google co-founder, Lawrence Page. The rank was calculated using an algorithm he designed that weighted links and ranking them accordingly.

This is no longer of primary importance but small business SEO specialist still take it into account when building an SEO strategy. While the direct effect is lessened the number of links that are need to effect page rank and the overall effect on trust rank is important to build the best overall strategy.

The quality of the website that the link comes from and the anchor text are important values that Google strongly reviews. The anchor text is the keywords the link is associated with and they are important in how search engines rank the website.

When a small business website optimization strategy is being put together it needs to take into account how search engines work and what will positively and negatively impact the website. Google has moved away from more easily exploited measures of ranking websites in search of relevant content and quality links so that people searching are presented with more useful results.

The use of anchor text to highlight relevant quality incoming links is a good strategy because it combines keywords and positive ranking to help improve the overall website ranking. The value of quality incoming links and identifying them with relevant anchor text is powerful way to get the most from search engine optimization. A small business SEO strategy that includes this will give the best possible results and ensure the highest possible ranking.

Learn How Small Business SEO Can Help You

The proper use of small business SEO is major part of the success of new businesses. A growing percentage of small businesses are using the Internet as their primary source of reaching potential and existing customers. If good small business SEO techniques are not used, then all of your marketing and research will have been wasted. This does not have to happen to you or your business. Learning how to use SEO to help your business is not difficult. Using organic SEO practices you can begin driving traffic to your website.

Always start with your content. That is the first step in using small business SEO to promote your website. Choose one or two keyword phrases that are relevant to your website and the topic of your web page. These phrases should be 2  3 words long. This will narrow the focus of your SEO. By limiting your target audience, you are decreasing the amount of competition. Over time, this can lead to first page placement on search engine pages.

It is also a smart idea to consider other methods of marketing, such as pay-per-click advertising. While this can cost a nominal amount of money, PPC management is not difficult. When creating a PPC campaign, use the same keyword phrases that you used when writing your content. This will help keep your advertisements relevant to the destination page. The more relevant your ad and content are to the related keyword, the higher your ad will appear in the advertising space.

Once you have the basics of small business SEO figured out and implemented throughout your website, consider expanding your reach by using social media. Social bookmarking sites are a good way to get other people to notice your website. Another area to consider is blogging. Blog posting allows you to easily have a place to post articles. If you don’t have the time to write the articles yourself, there are many article writing and distribution services available on the Internet. By combining all of these aspects of small business SEO, your small business can start growing its online presence and getting more visitors.

Small Business SEO Doesn’t Have to Be So Small

Small business SEO is often regarded as a relatively minor project: you get some keywords, you write some content, you create some backlinks, and the business eventually starts to see some traffic to it’s website. It’s kind of a pity, because there’s no particular reason for it. We’ve trained ourselves to look at a small business client and say “the poor broke entrepreneur barely has $35/month for our basic link-building package; he’s toast.”

Sure, a small business almost by definition doesn’t have a huge budget, but that doesn’t mean that we should be offering them low-budget options. $35/month is more than enough to purchase a blog post every week for a couple of cents per word — and for a price like that, you can find a native English blogger more than willing to put the effort in to generate sharebait once a week.

When you shoot the moon like that, one of two things happens: either you get normal everyday results, and the money you spent is just as well spent as if you had spent it on the low-key, low-budget link building and other low-level SEO practices, or you get success — you get a blog article that gets shares and gets it’s own natural backlinks and becomes a valuable part of the business’ traffic funnel.

So why are we as a industry not trying to crank up our levels of small business SEO? The answer is because that it takes thought. It’s not easy — there are a lot of good reasons why we want to keep doing the same repetitive, nominally-functional linkbuilding day and in and day out. It doesn’t tax our creativity or ask us to vary our routines. It gets home sooner so that we can all watch the Daily Show and relax over a pizza.

If you’re a small business owner, don’t settle for crap linkbuilding packages. Ask what your SEO company can give you in terms of:

• Local internet marketing
• Content marketing
• Social media
• Custom blog creation and Blog posting
• Video marketing

There are dozens of powerful options for SEO, but many companies will discard most of them if you tell them that your budget is in the double digits. Don’t let them; tell them you’re willing to negotiate, but that you want marketing that will do more than just have your website’s URL creeping up the SERPs over months.

Article Writing and Distribution: As Long As Content Is King

The phrase “Content is King” has been around for almost a decade now, and people still don’t seem to get it. They want to get their SERP rankings up by creating backlinks to thousands of low-value pages because it’s easy. The truth is that if you want to dominate the SERPs in the long-term — if you want to become a brand instead of a business — you need article writing and distribution, or as it’s become known lately, “content marketing”. It’s true no matter how big or small you are.

People seem to have this notion that small business SEO necessarily means inexpensive strategies that produce noticeable but not overwhelming results using 2nd-tier or long-tail keywords. The truth is that if you put forth the effort up front and hit the ground running by putting out high quality content, you can skip all of that and go directly to the big time.

What is high-quality content? Simple: it’s content that evokes emotions in the people who read it. Content that makes them want to interact — makes them want to comment, share, and otherwise talk about what they just read, watched, or heard. There’s lots of ways to achieve that goal.

Radio shock-jocks from Limbaugh to Stern have learned that saying outrageous things that you can (mostly) back up with facts is a great way to earn an audience. Major corporations from McDonalds to Johnson & Johnson have made huge money by associating themselves with things that are friendly, family-oriented, and fun. Internet meta-marketers appeal to people’s desire to make mountains of money overnight and promise the moon even if they know that only one in a thousand people who sign up will succeed to the degree they portray.

If you’re a small business and you’re trying to make a splash, your first order of business shouldn’t be learning what kinds of backlinks make for good off-page SEO these days: it should be studying your own industry and finding out what people think about it. What they care about that’s relevant. If you can create content that makes people think about your industry, your business, your products — you win.

If Your Small Business’ SEO Company Isn’t Pushing Mobile, They Need To Update

Small business SEO companies are big right now, for good reason: there are a vast number of small businesses in the United States right, and the significant majority of them either don’t have websites or don’t really do anything functional with their websites. Obviously, there’s huge commercial opportunity that they’re passing up — opportunity that an SEO can help them take advantage of.

But just like those small businesses aren’t taking advantage of the Internet, those SEO companies that are focused entirely on desktop-oriented websites and ‘traditional’ organic SEO aren’t taking advantage of the fastest-growing segment of the search market: mobile.

Defining ‘Mobile’
It sounds like it might be a simple thing: if someone is searching on their cell phone, they’re mobile, right? Well, that’s true, but it’s not complete, because there are a surprising number of people out there who have mobile devices that don’t have a mobile connection — if you’re using a Kindle Fire, an iPod, or Samsung RAZR, for example, you have a device that is ‘mobile’ in every sense except that it’s not actually mobile — you have to have a wifi connection in order to access the Internet.

Problem?
Fortunately, that’s not really an issue. I (yeah, I’m breaking the rules and talking in the first person here) went on a road trip from LA to Seattle to Detroit and back this summer, and I can tell you that there are enough free wifi hotspots all the way across the country that my wife and I were able to search for anything we needed in every city big enough to have a stoplight. McDonalds, local libraries, schools, Starbucks, Panera, Home Depot, Target, and on and on — there’s lots of wifi in the USA. Most of it, you can access from the parking lot.

Don’t Pass Up On It
The point is that there are literally multiple millions of people out there in the US alone that use their mobile devices to search for what they need. Studies said last year that 30% of total search volume in the US was mobile, and it’s only growing. If your SEO company isn’t telling you to get yourself set up for mobile traffic and get yourself listed in mobile search apps, they’re failing you — straight up.

Mobile Website Design Doesn’t Preclude Interactive Videos It Loves Them

Mobile sites are big business right now. There’s no doubt that the next twelve months are going to result in a huge amount of people using their mobile devices for search. It’s happening right now and it’s growing at an exponential rate. The way things are going; there will be more online activity through mobile devices than through anything else. What does this mean to you as a website owner? It means you have to look carefully at your mobile optimization of course!

It’s fairly common knowledge that one of the key methods of making your website mobile friendly is by ensuring that the mobile version of your site is low bandwidth. This makes it easier for people to view the site without having to put up with slow connections and poor displays. Having said this, there are some exceptions to this rule. The first is including video on your site.

Having an explanatory video on your site helps you in so many ways. Firstly, in a very true sense, it is more user friendly. Forget about bandwidth and keeping the search engines happy for a second  users like video. If you can keep your market happy, why wouldn’t you do that? Browsers are more inclined to find out about you through a video presentation than through a load of text, so give them what they want!

Beyond this very valid point, we can also mention Google’s preferences. They love to see a video on your home page  because they know it means you are delivering something your followers and potential customers want. So there is bound to be an increase in bandwidth with the inclusion of a video, but guess what? The pro outweighs the con. It’s a judgement call, and you should be falling on the side of video! That’s especially the case when it is such an affordable SEO technique. The cost is negligible against the benefits it can bring.

All you have to do is to go out and find a small business SEO company who can deal with a little video marketing for you. It will make the user experience on your site so much better, will help with your search engine page results and it won’t break the bank either! What have you got to lose?

People Watch More Videos Every Day — Local Internet Marketing Can Make Sure They’re Watching Yours

Every day that goes by, the number of videos watched on the Internet goes up. Back in January of this year, the number of YouTube videos watched in a single day reached four billion — and that’s just on YouTube! Granted, the total number of videos watched off YouTube probably wasn’t that large, but even if it was two-thirds YouTube’s amount, you’ve got an average of one video watched per person on the planet. That’s jawdropping.

At the same time, YouTube claims that it’s users up load one hundred years’ worth of video every day — so how are you supposed to get anyone to find YOUR videos in the avalanche of new uploads? That’s where you turn to your small business SEO professionals. SEO is the art of getting the search engines to show people what you want them to, so it’s the right tool to get your videos in front of people’s eyes.

The specific trick is called Local Internet Marketing: a method that attaches a placename and a keyword phrase to your video, so that only people who are actually relevant to your business (who use that placename in their searches) will be exposed to your videos. It would be a waste of everyone’s time if you made an awesome video about your new rock polishing business and then the people who saw it mostly came from Germany.

By leveraging Local Internet Marketing, your video can get in front of the people who will care about it most, and it’ll accomplish it’s goal — presumably, to increase awareness of your business and drive foot traffic into your store. Of course, this means you’ll have to have a video that can actually do those things.

Fortunately, that’s not as difficult as it seems, as long as you’re willing to not take yourself seriously. Producing a video that’s funny, useful, and tangentially relevant to your business is going to get a lot more attention and be a lot more memorable than focusing on “Hi, I’m Mike Barker and I sell smooth rocks.”

Mobile Website Design Is A Killer App For Many Small Businesses

If you have a smartphone, a tablet, or some other kind of mobile device — and a small business — you may have often wondered how you could develop an app for your business. Something that people would think is cool and use in order to meaningfully interact with your business from their mobile device.

Did you know there’s already an app that can do that? It’s called “the internet”, and people use it everyday to interact with billions of businesses across the world. Your business doesn’t need an app — it needs to have an expert perform a mobile website redesign on your current webpage.

Mobile website redesign can mean one of a few things. If you have a top-tier web designer, it means that they’ll take your current webpage and use a technique called Responsive Design. Responsive Design teaches the website how to ask each given device “what size is your display?” — and then uses the answer to ‘filter out’ all of the extraneous content, making sure that only the most critical elements are displayed on smaller screens. The end result is a single webpage that displays intelligently on every device that might look at it.

A more affordable web designer will take your existing webpage, decide on which elements are the most important, and then design and entirely new webpage (sometimes in an entirely different markup language). They’ll make sure that those critical elements are front-and-center, easy to use, and that it’s obvious what the website is supposed to be for.

The result, either way, is a website that acts in almost every way like that app you were thinking of. It’s easily accessible (because mobile websites are designed to load quickly and not strain user’s bandwidth limitations), it performs the same fundamental functions that your main website does, and because it’s easily redirected to from your main website, it even benefits from the same small business SEO that your main website does as well.

All of the sudden, people have your business at their fingertips from the bus, from the back of the car, or from their seat leeching wifi from the local Starbucks — and they didn’t even have to buy an app to get it.

Small Business SEO: How You Can Use Videos Even If You Can’t Afford Them

Small business SEO is a delicate balancing act between needing to improve your income and not being able to spend a lot of money to do it. That’s why SEO companies love to encourage small businesses to engage in certain high-value, low-cost practices like local internet marketing. But the world is a large and complex place, and few SEO companies know even most of the tricks that small businesses could be using to leverage inexpensive assets to get profound results.

Most small businesses shy away from video marketing, for example, because making a video is an expensive proposition. You have to hire someone to organize the whole affair, and assuming that he can run the camera as well as take care of storyboarding, scriptwriting, preproduction, postproduction, and distribution (good luck with that), you still need actors, a camera, and a few weeks.

OR…

…you can use one of those leveraging tricks. This one comes to us from the world of late-night commercials like those original 5-Hour Energy adverts from back in the day. These 1.5-minute commercials were marvelous feats of splicing in that they used 100% stock video clips available from various websites for what had to be a total of nearly (gasp!) eighty dollars.

Neatly spliced together to tell a story and given an appropriate voiceover, these supercheap commercials helped launch an entirely new category of product — the energy shot — into existence. Yes, it was a good idea whose time was ripe, but without these late-night promos to spread initial awareness of the product, it’s quite likely that 5HE would have taken years longer to become commonplace.

So ask yourself — what kind of story would you like to tell your customers? Can you find a series of video clips that will tell this story if you give it an appropriate voiceover? (If not, can you hire someone to do it for you?) If you could build a series of marketing videos for only a few hundred dollars, would you?