Archive for: January 2009

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve probably heard about Social Networking and how important it is to your small business web presence. Not too long ago, all you needed for an online presence was a web site, maybe with some online shopping capability, and email. But now that Social Networking has blasted onto the scene, there are new technologies that are becoming so popular that you may not be able to ignore them for much longer! So yes, it’s time to take the plunge and learn about Social Networking.

Social Networking is described by marketing expert John Jantsch as “the use of technology combined with social interaction to create or co-create value.” This technology includes blogs, micro-blogs (like Twitter), RSS, social search sites (like Technorati), social networks (like LinkedIn and Facebook), and social bookmarking sites (like de.licio.us) – all designed to make it easier to connect with others through social interaction on the web.

But one of the frustrating things about social networking is that like most new things, it takes time to learn and understand before it can become truly useful. So to help you tackle the “social work” of learning about Social Networking, here are some suggestions for learning the basics:

• Read other people’s blogs. If you don’t already have a list of regular blogs that you read, use a blog search engine to find and subscribe to a few blogs you are interested in. Look for industry blogs, blogs from experts, and even read your competitors’ blogs. This will help you understand how people in your industry use blogs, which will in turn help you become better equipped to write blog posts for your own company.
• Use Social Bookmarking. Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us allow users to tag interesting pages or articles, put them in specific categories, and then share them publicly. Be sure to bookmark your own articles that you find on the web, or pages that mention your business, and ask others to do the same for you. These bookmarks are like “votes” for your content and can also help build inbound links, which is critical for boosting search engine rankings.
• Set up a Profile on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the most popular social networking site for businesses, and it’s pretty easy to use and make connections. Just follow the steps to set up a profile, then start experimenting with joining groups, adding applications, and making connections. You can even upload the contacts from your Outlook address book and find out which ones are already using LinkedIn!
• Try Twitter. One of the new social sites creating a lot of buzz is Twitter, which is a micro-blogging platform that allows users to keep in touch using short, 140-character “tweets.” Five Sparrows recently added Twitter to its regular marketing routine with clients as a way to instantly provide them with useful, interesting information and special deals or promotions. Twitter has a lot of potential as a mobile marketing tool since it allows small businesses to reach customers wherever they are; whether they are at their computers or carrying around their cell phones (and at least for now, it’s free!).

  NOTE: If you’d like to receive valuable web tips, free resources, special deals, and other useful information, you can follow Five Sparrows on Twitter here.

There is of course a lot to learn with Social Networking, especially since the tools and technologies continue to change and evolve all the time. But with a little effort and some basic understanding, you can add some Social Networking strategies to your marketing routine and start improving your overall presence on the web. Eventually, it can lead to increased organic, natural traffic and better search engine rankings for your web site.

Your small business probably uses multiple marketing “channels” already, whether you think of them as channels or not. Print advertising, email campaigns, pay-per-click marketing, direct mail, banner ads – all of these are different types of marketing channels that you may already be using to promote your products and services. But although most small businesses know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important for their web sites, not many use SEO as one of their strategic marketing channels.

So why consider using SEO as a key marketing strategy? Because like it or not, search engines (especially Google) are going to remain the most predominant method of driving traffic to web sites in the foreseeable future. Period. So if you want to capture some of that traffic, SEO should probably be included – or even prioritized – as a strategic marketing channel in your marketing plans.

Here’s what makes SEO such a good channel for small business marketing:

1. Tremendous ROI – Often, it doesn’t take a huge investment to improve your search engine results. Adding a few simple strategies each month can add up to great results over time. But if you’re looking for faster results, a complete optimization of your web site will produce the greatest results in the shortest amount of time. And compared with the returns that an optimized site can produce, investing in SEO (either time or money or both) is a great value for your business.
2. Higher Brand Visibility – When your business and/or brand shows up in the top search results, you gain web visibility every time someone searches for your terms. The sheer repetition of seeing your business consistently listed at the top creates not only visibility, but also credibility and brand recognition. I’m sure you’ve heard that consumers need to see or hear a message at least three times before they pay attention to it, so the more they see your business in the search results, the better for you and your business.
3. Accurate Tracking and Measuring – With all the web analytics tools available today, it’s fairly easy to capture data that can help you determine what’s working on your site and what’s not, enabling you to make adjustments and constantly improve your results. If you’re not tracking what happens with your web site each month, how can you know if it’s truly helping your business?
4. New Leads and Sales Generation – Since users turn to search engines almost 80% of the time to find information, there is virtually an inexhaustible supply of new prospects and potential customers searching for the types of products and services you provide. SEO can help your web site show up when people are most likely to visit – while they are in the process of actively searching for your information!
5. Pre-Qualified Traffic – By optimizing your web site, you can attract the types of visitors that are important to your business by using highly targeted keywords and phrases that directly relate. For instance, a law firm with a non-optimized site would likely attract all types of clients, even though the practice may specialize only in family law. By optimizing for “family law,” the site is much more likely to attract pre-qualified clients who are already looking specifically for this type of service.

As a small business, it’s important that you take advantage of the marketing channels that make the most sense for you. And by considering SEO as a strategic marketing channel, you open up your business to a whole new world driven by the web and its mighty search engines (and yes, I mean Google). This new channel may help you discover some new and untapped benefits that will help your business grow and thrive well into the future.

If you’re like most small businesses, your web site is an investment. And like most investments, you’d like to see a nice return on that investment over time. But unlike other investments, your web site doesn’t gain any value if it just sits there untouched – you have to maintain it and re-invest in it from time to time in order for it to grow in value and produce big returns for your business.

So if your web site isn’t currently getting the results you’d like, here are five ways to leverage your web investment to help your site raise its rankings, convert more customers, and boost your bottom line!

1. Redesign if it’s time. Let’s face it, web technology changes constantly, but small businesses often launch their web sites (with a giant sigh of relief) and then forget about them. If your site hasn’t been updated in more than a year or so, it’s probably time to bring it up to current standards.  

   Upgrading to “current standards” involves more than just updating the HTML code and CSS styles. It also means adding the standard web functionality that today’s users expect when they visit a web site. Common technology like blogs, video, web widgets, mobile applications, geo-tagging, podcasts, and sophisticated drop-down navigation systems are just some of the features that differentiate today’s updated, progressive web sites from their outdated counterparts.

2. Optimize for the search engines. It probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. A non-optimized web site simply cannot compete with the millions and millions of other sites on the web – many of which have already been optimized.  

   Your web site is one of the most important marketing tools that your small business has, but if customers and prospects cannot find it, you are missing out on the traffic, new leads, and additional sales that an optimized site can produce.

   At the very least, make sure your site correctly uses meta data, heading tags, and link anchor text. You can also build up your inbound links by taking advantage of industry directories, your Chamber of Commerce, and business-related organizations that allow you to add your link to their web sites. Also, you should always create unique, optimized landing pages for your email campaigns, advertisements, or pay-per-click campaigns to help boost your search engine placements, as well as maximize the potential of converting your web visitors into paying customers.

3. Fix your navigation. To have a well-organized, usable web site you must have an easy-to-use navigation system that allows users to quickly find the information they are looking for. Make sure that your site’s navigation system is consistent on all your web pages, and that information is never buried more than 2 or 3 clicks deep anywhere on the site.  

   Consider implementing a menu with mouse-over drop downs or sub categories that are visible without having to click, so users can see their choices without wasting clicks to unrelated pages. The faster users can find exactly what they are looking for, the faster they can convert into new customers.

4. Get Blogging. If you don’t already have a blog on your site, get one, and update it on a regular basis. This will boost your site’s search engine rankings, help build trust with your web visitors, and increase user loyalty and return visits to your site.  

   Recent reports show that almost half of all North American companies already have a blog, and this probably includes your competitors. Blogging has really become quite mainstream, and it’s a great way to reach your target audience while improving search engine positions, increasing traffic to your site, and improving customer engagement and participation.

5. Be a trusted resource for customers. If your web site is little more than an online “brochure,” consider adding some features that visitors will really appreciate. How-to articles, web widgets, a newsletter archive, feedback forms, free downloads, and RSS feeds of useful resources are all examples of web features that users love.  

   When you reward web visitors with features that are useful and provide value, you are establishing yourself as an expert who cares about helping them solve their problems. And isn’t that what customers are really looking for? They don’t care so much about your company or how long you have been in business, they care about solving their own problems! (Marketing 101.) So use your web site to demonstrate that you are more interested in providing visitors with value than tooting your own horn, and you will be rewarded with motivated, interested customers who already trust you and are ready to buy!

By now, you’ve probably heard that inbound links are critical to helping your site show up at the top of the search engine results. So what exactly are inbound links? Inbound links are one-way links that point to your site from another “site” on the web; however, not all inbound links are created equal. The inbound links that will help you the most are those that come from authority web sites, industry and/or expert blogs, social networking sites, and other quality sites that provide solid, one-way inbound links to your web site (see the section on inbound links in the previous article, above, for additional details). But how do you actually get those quality, one-way inbound links that point to your web site?

Here are eight techniques you can use to build the types of inbound links that will not only help your site perform better in the search engines, but can also help improve your web visibility and drive new traffic to your site at the same time!

1. Social Networking: This web phenomenon is just too important to ignore. The major search engines have already announced that they now include social networking information in their search results, and the number of people using these sites continues to grow exponentially. This is where your customers are “hanging out” online (the fastest-growing demographic in Facebook is users over the age of 35). This is also where the search engines have told you they are looking for information. If you are truly interested in building links and getting noticed, it’s time to get serious about a social marketing strategy. (And do consider using an Integrated Social Marketing (ISM)® approach!)
2. Press Releases: Sending out press releases is one of the fastest ways to build quality inbound links, as well as promote news about your business. Just be sure to use your keywords as links in the body of your press release, since these then become the inbound links to your site once the release is picked up.
3. E-Newsletters: Publishing a monthly (or weekly) e-newsletter is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and prospects, as well as keep your business name “top of mind” with your readers. But when you publish useful, quality information, people will naturally pass it on to their own network of contacts, which has the potential to plant multiple inbound links to your web site each time an article is shared on the web.
4. Article Syndication: Re-use the articles from your e-newsletters by syndicating them on article marketing sites. Include a keyword-rich author resource box (your contact information and bio), with links back to your web site. Your links will be visible not only on the article marketing site, but also each time someone else re-publishes your article as content elsewhere on the web (blogs, web sites, e-newsletters, etc.).
5. Blogging: If you don’t already have a blog for your business, you may want to consider adding one just for the boost it can give your web site in the search engines! Most search engines index blog posts almost instantly, and you have complete freedom to use your keywords in the content of your posts as well as using them as link text, both of which will help you gain points with the search engines.
6. Google Alerts: You can use the free Google Alerts service to help identify other quality blogs and web sites where you can plant inbound links. For instance, if you set up your Google Alerts service to monitor the keywords “office supplies”, Google will alert you when it finds web sites and blogs containing those keywords. You can then go visit those pages and leave a comment and add your link, (depending on the content of the page, of course). Just be sure to leave valuable information in your comments, and not just your link. You want your comment to not only be approved, but to also flow naturally as part of the discussion.
7. Web Videos: Research shows that using video on a web site improves user engagement and retention, and today’s video sharing sites like YouTube make it easy to publish and share videos on the web. Video files can also be “optimized” with keyword tags, and can be linked back to your web site. Video sharing sites also let you share videos through your social channels as well, giving you even more opportunity to plant inbound links to your site in various places around the web.
8. Viral Marketing: If you have a whitepaper, e-book, or presentation just sitting around gathering virtual dust on your computer, consider taking it viral. Give it away for free, and encourage people to pass it around to their network of contacts as well. Make sure the piece has plenty of links back to your web site, since the piece may end up being posted in lots of different channels on the web.

By using these techniques, you can help build the quality, one-way links that your site needs in order to improve in the search engine rankings. You may not be able to use all of these suggestions, but you can use as many different techniques as makes sense for your particular small business. Since many SEO professionals estimate that about 60% of your web site’s ranking in Google comes from the number of quality inbound links, it makes sense to give some serious attention to building inbound links to your site.