Small businesses have some very distinct advantages over corporate players. In the SEO game, they are able to respond quickly to changes, make innovations quickly and add functions to their websites. In many cases, big companies have to go thru extensive consultation, decision making processes and signing offs before anything happens. Our experience indicates that most large companies are a long way behind online but have the power of their brand to their advantage. An example of this is that they can’t be found in the search engines for what they sell but they get plenty of traffic when people search for their brand e.g. coke.
Small businesses often target a specific niche market or client and in online promotion, this is a distinct advantage. It is far easier to promote your site to a niche market than to a general market e.g. border collie breeders vs dog breeders. When working out who you want to attract to your site, you should consider this. Is there any point in attracting everyone looking for dog breeders when you only sell border collies? You may get lots of traffic but are they really your potential client or just empty numbers?
One thing that is important to think about is that many small business sites lack content. They have 5 – 10 pages which is fine when there is not much competition in the market place but as competition grows (as it is now rapidly doing), you will need to think about adding more content/pages. Make sure that your website has the ability to expand under your control and don’t rely on having to send things to the programmers.
All modern sites should really be build on some sort of content management system (CMS) and there is plenty around. A nice easy one that the search engines love is the blogging software – WordPress (www.wordpress.org). It allows you to set it up to look like a normal site but everytime you add a page, it tells the search engines and they index it. Our record is now 12 minutes to have a page listed in Google… try that with a normal site!
Search engine optimisation will allow you to lead your market and bring in leads to your business that other businesses aren’t getting. The online market is growing all the time and all you have to do is ask people and you will find that they Google before they Yellow Pages these days… especially younger staff members!