This Is Small Business Week: Don’t Neglect Your Online Presence

If you own a small business, you know that online visibility is one of the keys to success. And these days, harnessing the Web is crucial to any marketing plan.

“While most small business owners know they need a strong Web presence, many of them are not taking enough action to build and maintain it,” says Tim Carroll, Vice President of Small Business Engagement at Deluxe Corp., a provider of marketing services and products for small businesses.

In fact, of those small business owners who put a high level of importance on Web presence, 70 percent spend less than one hour a week maintaining it, according to a new Deluxe study. In contrast, only 1.2 percent spend 10 or more hours each week on their Web maintenance.

National Small Business Week, May 12-16, is the perfect time to learn how to use the Internet to keep your business top of mind with prospective customers.  And Carroll offers some top tips for maximizing your company’s presence online.

• Interact: Since current and prospective consumers use social media, you can’t neglect this marketing approach. Social media marketing isn’t just about gaining followers. It becomes a vehicle for sharing your company’s message, as well as driving traffic to your website. This will ultimately help generate new customers and referrals.

Don’t be afraid to use Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites to ask customers for feedback and show your personality. Use calls to action to acquire new followers, engage them further and encourage reviews of your services.

Many small businesses turn to consultants or social marketing services for help with developing and executing a social media strategy. When effective, these efforts will place a brand in front of its target audience. Small business owners should look for a service that also tracks results in order to gain insight into how its customers engage online.

• Website: “Today, a business without a website is a business without a face,” says Carroll. “A clean, easy-to-navigate, and mobile-friendly online presence is one your customers will remember.”

Unfortunately, less than a third of small business owners think they are proficient or extremely proficient at maintaining their individual company websites, which is why many seek outside help developing a site and building content.

• Search engines: With 91 percent of Internet users utilizing search engines, according to the Deluxe-commissioned study, search engine optimization can be your key to better visibility online. After all, a website is hardly useful if no one can find it.

Additionally, consider search engine marketing services to help your online advertising and to make use of local searches by more effectively targeting your customer audience.

• Email marketing: Small business email marketing is the centerpiece of any effort to stay in touch with existing customers, while reaching out and finding new ones. Use it to promote new items and offer special discounts to loyal customers or to simply keep in touch.

Small business owners know they need to be online. It just takes commitment and the right tools to capitalize on the potential.

Is Your Website SEO Qualified?

Although search engine optimization (SEO) has definite rules and procedures on the Web, it also allows for user choices, creativity and flexibility for quality site benefits. There is on-site SEO and off-site SEO. In general, on-site optimization enables the site to draw greatly increased notice and attention from search engines, while off-site SEO strongly aids the site in attaining high search engine rankings.

1. Website Page Titles and Descriptions. – Make sure that your site’s homepage lists the exact name of your business or website accurately. The title of each page on your site must concisely reveal the page theme and content. Clearly describe the intent of each page in your Web content to aid your website visitors’ productive use of your site. This will increase your conversion rates and ongoing sales volumes. Create page meta tags that are short, clear and descriptive.

2. Permanent Link Structure and Strength. – The format of your site URLS which show in the address bar of your browser should be simple and direct. Avoid keyword stuffing, or overuse, but include clearly descriptive words about your site content. You can insert hyphens to separate some words for the sake of clarity, but refrain from creating long URLS.

3. Breadcrumbs. – Include a breadcrumb on each of your website’s internal pages. The term “breadcrumb” refers to a series of links, often at the top of a Web page, placed there as a navigational aid for site visitors. When using WordPress or many website builders to structure a site, you will find free plugins to create your breadcrumbs.

4. Internal Link Usage. – You need to include internal links throughout your website. These are links within page content that direct site visitors to other pages of your site. By inserting each link with anchor text, your page content will read smoothly while providing easy access to additional content that is important to your business or site subject matter.

5. Benefits of the 404 Page. – Since the overall purpose of SEO is to streamline and enhance use of your website by visitors, inclusion of the 404 page is helpful. This page will be displayed if a site user incorrectly inserts a URL or searches for a nonexistent page on your site. By saving your site viewers time and effort, you will often encourage them to stay longer on your site, making use of the content, products and services you have made available to them.

6. Optimization of Site Images. – To enhance attention levels of viewer for images included in your website content, use Alt Text to insert descriptions. This is a good place to insert a few keywords, as well. Also include keywords within file names for your images, and be sure to separate keywords with use of short dashes or hyphens. Remember that small images on your website promote site speed. For this reason, when uploading large photos to Web pages, use image editing tools to resize them while maintaining their quality.

7. Enhanced Page Speed. – Google considers page speed an important page rank factor. By increasing your site’s page speed, you will improve visitor experience, productive Web traffic levels and conversion rates. To ensure that your website pages have optimal speed, eliminate any unneeded plug-ins, optimize all image sizes and consider using a caching plug-in or service. By consulting Google Page Speed Service, you can accurately determine your site’s performance speed.

8. Quality Content and Analytics. – As always, all website content must be of high quality for the success of your business or personal interest projects. Written text, photos, graphics, audio, video, animation and interactive features on your site must function well and be appealing to site visitors or customers. Along with good quality, comprehensive SEO, you will want to include good CRO techniques. With use of CRO, or conversion rate optimization, you can determine what areas of your site are most often visited and used, which will greatly assist your future efforts to capture more visitors as site members, customers and ongoing clients. With use of such aids as Google Analytics, you can also track all site activity to better plan your next marketing and ad campaigns for higher rates of profits and success. In addition, make sure your website is mobile-friendly and fully optimized for quality mobile device visibility and use. You can use plug-ins or Web services for professional mobile site optimization.

-George Nielson

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