ASU Small Business Answers – Websites & SEO

Small Business Looking for “Google Love” for his Website – Improve SEO

We get a lot of questions about websites and especially how small business owners can improve their web presence with search engines to “get found“.  This question is one that I am sure a lot of our readers, small business clients and friends have so hopefully this will provide you with some good tools to get those “virtual bread crums” working for you to have folks find you on the Internet.  Again I have polled our Internet Marketing experts for their input. 

Hi Herb,  In a conversation I had with you, a mention was made of a program that someone in your group has that assists in SEO.  I’m able to get on Yahoo’s first page, but Google and Bing don’t seem to “share the love”.  I have built the site in question with WordPress.  who is a person I can contact to help me get pointed in a better direction?  Thanks…signed “Looking for Google-Love” 

Dear Google Love, good question especially for a small business trying to find ways to help on-line search locate your website.   Regardless of whether you are B2C or B2B (business to consumer or business to business) your potential customers are hitting Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines as their FIRST resource when looking for information about a business, a product or service so knowing how to leave those “virtual bread crums” to help the search engines serve your website up to those surfers is absolutely critical.  And… it doesn’t happen by “luck”.  It happens by careful website optimization.  Our friends at Hubspot.com have a lot great blog articles, pod-casts and more to help both novices and more experienced Internet marketing folks improve their ability to “get found”.   From what I have learned attending Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing University series web optimization depends on two main factors: 

1. Having the right Keywords and optimizing your pages around those keywords
2. Inbound links -other sites that find your site to be of value and link to you.  Today, while keyword are still important links have taken over as a major part of having Google nano-bots move you up the food chain and of course more difficult for small businesses, especially if they are local to get.

Keywords are still critical for your website so knowing the types of words your potential customers are banging into their search engine is the first place to start.  If you aren’t sure then one of the first places to go is Google Insight for Search.  Great free tool by Google that allows you to input words you think your customers may be using and then see what other similar key words they are actually using.  For more information about keyword search try this Hubspot Blog article “Keyword Tips”and forgive a blatant “advertisement for the SBTDC” but you may also want to attend our next Google Tools & Alerts seminar where we show attendees how to find keywords relevant to their business, industry, etc. 

  

While Keyword account for about 25-30% of the juice today the majority of “oomph” comes from inbound links to your website from other sites.  Google and the other search engines figure if a number of other sites are linking to your website there must be something there worth knowing about and will give more weight to those.  Before you run out and try to get a bunch of folks to link to your site however, it is all about authority.  So if your cousin who blogs about underwater basket weaving links to your site (but our site has nothing to do with underwater basket weaving)  Google will not give you nearly as much consideration as if a website in your industry with authority finds your content interesting and links to you.  Worth working on but often tough for a small business especially one in a local market to acquire. 

However there are a number of other “tricks” and tools to help improve your ability to get found on all of these search engines beyond your website itself.  Here are some tools that you can incorporate that will help improve overall SEO: 

  “Claim” Your Local Listings Make sure you have gone to all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Best of the Web, Yelp, etc.) and “claimed” your business.  A great tool to make sure you have your local listings is GetListed.Org.  This website will help “claim” the major search engines for local listings, provide some very good FAQs and guides to make the most of local listings, and overall help in your ability to get found.   The ASU SBTDC also offers a FREE 2 hour seminar on a regular cycle Called Get Listed Locally that will help small businesses capture their local listings and grow their on-line presence. 

• Social Media Networks – Google and the other search engines ADORE social media… and you should too.  The search engines are always looking for you to post “fresh content” and social media networks offer a great way to do that.  If your business is not using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, SlideShare, Flickr, etc. you need to get started.
• Blogging – Don’t leave!… I know the idea of blogging on a regular basis scares the “you know what” out of a lot of folks:
  • How do I get started
  • How do I even do it
  • What can I talk about
  • What if nobody reads
  • I don’t have the time
  • etc. etc. etc.

 I understand that fear.  I postponed blogging for a long time for just the same reasons but if I had it all to do over again, I would have started blogging before I even got more fully engaged in the social media just because of the search potential out there and ability to add fresh content to keep the Search Engines happy (and of course improve my ranking) that can come from blogging.  Studies from Hubspot have shown that companies that blog have a significantly higher rate of visitor to lead conversion to their websites and a significantly higher Lead to customer conversion.    So it should be something you consider. 

Recap…what can you do to start improving your ranking in all the major search engines? 

• Determine appropriate keywords and apply them correctly on your website pages, your local listing sites, your social media networks and your blog – monitor changes in what keywords people are using on a regular basis – they change
• Look into getting some links to your website from “industry leaders” or other influencers in your industry where possible
• By all means Claim your businesses on local listings using GetListed.Org
• Determine the appropriate social media networks to get involved with and supply good relevant content (articles, video, photos, etc.) on a regular basis
• Finally, consider starting a blog.  Do some homework here first to make sure you start our right once you decide to get involved in blogging.

From our Panel of Experts…. 

Christi Wharton with Wharton Website Design and Marketing suggested: 

Hi Joe, (not his real name!) looking at your site, it appears that the first thing you need to look at is your use of keywords.  Also your domain is set to expire soon.  We would recommend that you renew your domain for at least 5 years.  Check out the SEO category on our blog at Wharton Website Design and Marketing Blog for more information on how to best use keywords and to find other helpful SEO information you can use to improve your site.  Something to consider when using keywords is that today you want to use fewer but more relevant keywords for the pages on your site.  In the old days you could “stuff as many keywords into your Meta keywords” as it would hold  but today search engines will actually penalize you if they think you are cramming a lot of keywords into one page because it will look“spammy” to the search engine.  Better today to select a couple keywords for optimization on each page and use those strategically in: 

• URL address if possible
• Page Title
• Headers
• in body of content (bold)
• Limit meta keywords to the 2 or 3 that most accurately represent that page
• Use meta descriptions to tell reader what the page is about.  Meta Descriptions may not get SEO form the search engines but they have what we call “Eyeball SEO” because it tells the reader what your site or page is all about.

Hope this helps good luck   Christi Wharton 

Well “Looking for Google-Love” hope the was helpful to you.  While I don’t like to use our blog as an advertisement in anyway, I would suggest that you may want to contact a website designer that understands how Web 2.0 works like Christi Wharton at Wharton Website Design and Marketing for a consultation.  Websites optimized for search are significantly different than they were even 5 years ago and it is important that sites start thinking from a Web 2.0 point of view.   They are a great resource for businesses in Northeast and North Central Arkansas looking to optimize websites, integrate social media and generally be search engine friendly.  May be well worth the time to visit with her. 

I know a lot of small businesses are dealing with the same issues on optimizing their sites to have potential customers locate their businesses on line.  Hope this article was helpful.  Give us your feedback.  Thanks

Tagged as: Arkansas small business, ASU Small Business and Technology Development Center, blogging, Facebook, GetListed.org, Local listings, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, small business marketing, social media marketing, Twitter