Internet marketing circles are all abuzz with the stunning range of opportunities available to marketers in search engine optimization and search marketing for local brick-and-mortar businesses.
Local businesses by and large have not done much with Internet marketing, and what they have done has generally been ineffective.
That is a two-edged sword, because on the one hand, there is a lot of work that can be done to help local businesses. On the other hand, many early adopters have been burned badly either by inept SEO work or by SEO ripoff artists.
And yet it can be extremely profitable for small, brick-and-mortar businesses to do search engine optimization on a small scale. That has been proven time and again—but you have to know how.
Part of the problem is that small business owners seldom understand what promotion on the Internet can do for them, much less how it should be done correctly. They do not know what the services should cost or how to pick a knowledgeable consultant. They are generally either ripe for the picking or total skeptics.
One of the biggest problems I have seen is the general perception that “a website is a website,” and you either have one or don’t, that an SEO analyst just waves a magical wand and turns your sow’s ear of a website into a silk purse overnight. That is just wrong.
The truth is that the best SEO money you can spend is on creating an on-page-optimized website with quality content, well organized from the point of view of site visitors, attractively (and logically) designed, and with all the hidden on-page SEO taken care of as well.
Once you do all that, the site may get ranked quickly by Google without a lot of off-page SEO. But without proper site organization, design, and on-page optimization, doing much off-page SEO in that case is largely a waste of time.
Why On-Page SEO Is the Most Effective SEO
Here’s why on-page SEO is paramount:
1. Google and other search engines will not rank your site well in search results if the text is too sparse, too off topic, or too poorly written, if your site appears to be badly organized, or if the bounce rates (how quickly visitors arriving at your site leave it again) are too high. In other words, Google knows poor on-page SEO even if you do not.
2. If potential customers/clients cannot find what they want on your site, can’t easily read your site, or find it unpleasant or confusing, they leave. Oh, sure, tastes vary, and if you could afford to drive 500 visitors to your site for every customer who actually buys, you might do all right.
But that kind of waste of traffic is much too expensive to sustain. That means even if you substitute ads for natural search results, (a) the ads will be hideously expensive and (2) site visitors will leave immediately. Why waste money?
If, on the other hand, the site has good on-page SEO, a mobile version that automatically displays to smart phones, good content and good navigation (from the users’ point of view), that site can make a lot of profit for a local business.
How to Promote a Local Business Effectively with Good SEO
Here are some ways to use a web site to promote a local business effectively:
1. Prominently display the information customers look for first: hours, location, map, exactly what kinds of goods and service are offered.
2. Make sure the info on the site is organized intuitively from a potential customer’s point of view—not from the business owners point of view, which can be quite different.
3. Make sure the site is as easy as possible to read. Do not use trendy, kewl web design. Use black text on a white background. Use standard, professional type design and formatting.
4. Use relevant photos of actual products or services, and provide captions and alt text for them so Google knows that they are there and what they show (because Google bots cannot actually see pictures as we do).
5. Make sure the layout is clear, standard, and easy to scan at a glance.
6. Use page titles that clearly and uniquely identify each page of the site and tie it to the site as a whole.
7. Have a good domain name. If the business has an existing site with a poor domain name. buy a good name or two and point them to the site.
8. Have content that answers customer and potential customer questions. Make it easy to find, easy to read, well organized, and pleasant.
9. Get a professional to do (at least) the less visible on-page SEO, because that is the hardest for business owners to figure out, even if they have an in-house techie to implement it.
10. Repeat after me: Web designers are almost never trained in SEO, and most do not even bother with it. They may not even know enough about SEO/SEM to realize that they do not know how to do it.
Potential Uses of SEO Combined with Traditional Marketing
Here are some potential uses of SEO in combination with traditional marketing:
- Make sure customers can find you.
- Answer questions and make sure they know you have what they want.
- Provide coupons and other incentives to get them into the building—just like print ads.
- Provide incentives and make it easy for them to refer others to your business—even better than print ads.
- For restaurants, post menus and other information that tantalizes potential customers.
- For professional services, post credentials, background information, reviews, and testimonials that do a great selling job before the customer comes to the physical store or office—-and that get them to either make an appointment or just drop by, as appropriate.
- Convince and make it easy for potential and existing customers to join a mailing list, Like a facebook page, and Follow a Twitter account that can draw them into (or back into) the store sooner and more often by making it cheap and easy to notify them of sales and special events. QR codes on web pages can even get customers to provide their cell phone numbers and agree to receive text messages from the business, a practice that has proven immensely profitable in recent years.
It is too bad that small business owners do not yet appreciate the resources available to them. It is downright shameful that so many small business owners have been burned by bad SEO. But with good communication, the potential both for them and for SEO consultants is huge.
