Shaymein Ewer Website Design & Internet Marketing

In February 2011, Google made big news on the Internet by publishing an algorithm change for search engine relevancy. By and large this was designed to punish duplicate content farms that re-purpose the same written content over and over in different forms. I’ve seen plenty of panicked content online about what this means to e-marketers and website developers, but little in the way of how small business owners can capitalize on the Google algorithm change. This post is for you.

Winners and Losers

There were plenty of losers that aggregate informational content that are now scrambling to learn what has happened and re-strategize ways to defeat the Google changes, much like the continued war between police radar methods and the radar detector manufacturers.

There were winners too, whose keyword positioning has increased their relevance in the alpha-dominant world of Google. Take a look at the following portion of a spreadsheet, taken from wisetartupblog.com and originally compiled by Systrix:

View Image: Systrix Chart

This is only a partial snippet of an extensive table. What you need to focus on is the % win column. By way of comparison, article farm sites like ezinearticles.com posted negative percent losses exceeding 90%. The short of it? The bad actors according to Google got their a%#es kicked and the better, content rich sites like the sampling above benefit in SEO rank as a result.

What Does it Mean to Small Business?

You might be thinking, “Hey, that’s great. Sears and Bed, Bath and Beyond might be doing better. I might pick up a few shares of stock. So what?” And you’d be right. For most of these online properties, they really don’t impact you. But take a look at the social media sites that I ‘X’d’ on the chart. Why are these important to you?

Because as a small business owner you can participate in those sites at literally no cóst to you if you have the time to make a commitment to a social media strategy. Their rising tide will lift all the boats that float on their oceans. These sites are free to use out of pocket, but let’s not kid ourselves. To effectively capitalize on the use of these, you need to dedicate the time or assign or hire someone to do it. Either way you are paying for the effort, but I’d strongly suggest that you include this social media strategy as a part of your overall marketing budget, even if it means reducing your traditional media like print or radio spots. Your payback will likely be higher and grow over time.

Facebook

Now, Facebook is the biggest player, and I will be the first to tell you that I don’t yet know how to capitalize on Facebook for small business as well as you likely already do. Make sure you have a personal listing and a company listing, and post your updates and upcoming events on the page, and promote your company Facebook page on your site. Soon you will build some followers that you can engage a dialogue with around your business.

This seems to work wonders for businesses with a local model, like retail or specialty stores, resorts, etc. Facebook is rapidly becoming the number one online means of organizing events like socials, customer appreciations, learning seminars and the like. People set their calendars around stuff they ‘Like’ on Facebook.

LinkedIn

I do know something about LinkedIn. Perhaps you picked up my eBook with instructions on how to get around and really capitalize on your LinkedIn presence or watched the video tutorials that came with it. Then you already know the ‘how’ of building a LinkedIn profile and working it. So why haven’t you done it yet? The table above reinforces the fact that LinkedIn is becoming more relevant in the eyes of Google, the biggest search engine of all time, with a 15% boost in keyword dominance.

My advice to small business owners is this:

- Put your profile on LinkedIn and that of your top company officers

- Put up a company profile for your business on LinkedIn and take the time to do your service listings for relevancy and searchability

- Assign someone to enlist your people in target LinkedIn Groups and participate

- Enhance your basic profile with Applications (see eBook and videos), especially posting video to your profile(s). I cannot state enough what video does to enhance uniqueness and SEO, and remember, LinkedIn profiles are indexed as individual pages on, you guessed it, Google. Google loves video. Read the next section to find out why.

YouTube

You can see in the table that YouTube is also doing well under the new Google rules of the game. Not surprising, as Google owns YouTube. In fact, the Google people had to run denials and state that YouTube increases after the changes were incidental. Uh huh.

This re-demonstrates in spades what Google thinks of video content. Here are suggestions for you:

Get some quality video content on your website, Facebook and LinkedIn pages. This does not have to cost a lot.

Use video instead of, or in addition to, words to promote changes in your company, new product releases, special events, spotlight employees, or company capabilities. We have a package of Executive Video Interviews we use to help small businesses do this, recording the owner and key officers on Skype. If you don’t use us, you can still use a webcam or handheld camera, you don’t need to hire a film crew or disrupt the business for a major shoot, but it just can’t be bad.

Post your videos on YouTube on your channel. This is free. Let YouTube host your videos and embed them in your site as discussed above. This gets the video on your site and takes advantage of the relationship between Google and YouTube, including the obvious search engine optimization gains.

The world is changing for small business. You can ignore it or try to exploit what it is giving you. Social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn are all rising in popularity by an extraordinary degree and show no signs of diminishing. These have long been solid strategies to promote your business but now more than ever. You can’t run your business based upon the whims of Google nor would I ever suggest it, but you can take advantage of what Google has done. If you’re not on board with these social media outlets, start thinking about it now. Begin with one of them, taste a little revenue success, and then move onto others.

Having a website for your business is something you cannot avoid confronting these days. Most small businesses hire a friend, a neighbor, a college student or a freelancer to build them one. The process can be expensive, frustrating and time consuming and go beyond budget if not approached correctly. At the end of the project, you may find yourself with a website that doesn't quite meet the vision you had when you first got excited about building a website.

A lot of the frustrations lead back to the old idea, "If you want it done right, do it yourself." After seeing a lot of websites go downhill, I can't say that I blame you. You as the business owner know your business. You know it well. It's what you do everyday to succeed and reach your sales goals. So for someone else to get the sense of it can be difficult, especially if that person just dabbles in website design and computers and doesn't have any formal training or experience in marketing, sales, design or content strategy.

These frustrations lead many small businesses to companies like Intuit or GoDaddy to provide a low-cost, do-it-yourself solution. They pitch a simple solution to the design problem by picking a template, customizing it and then poof! You get search engine placement and your sales go up! But is that the reality? Can you, for a few dollars a month really make an impact online with your business?

Here are a few claims that need to be debunked:

Designing the Website Yourself

Take a look around the advertising world, either online or offline. Can you see and recognize the importance of good layout, color scheme, and overall message and use of imagery that speaks to you the potential buyer? Billions are spent every year on advertising design and branding for a good reason. When a company truly wants to succeed and have a voice online, they don't adjust a template to speak to their client base. They take time to understand their daily problems, business goals, competitors and customer needs. When you hire a good agency, they should sit down and try to understand your business, your objectives to having a website and then create a solution to address those concerns.

Also, there are technical barriers that come with a template service. Most people don't understand the importance of image manipulation. If you take pictures of your products or services you cannot simply go from your camera to your website without optimizing the image, color correct the image or use other techniques that give your website what it needs to perform professionally. The results can lead to a distorted image, inconsistent colors and branding, and poor layout, all of which discredit your business.

Usability of a website is the most important thing to an end user. There are many ways to phrase the meaning of usability, but in short, usability is the approach of making websites easy for an end user to basically use your website. "Cool" loading animations from Flash, welcome pages and websites that feature a ton of cluttered content and buttons can make the end user leave your website. If you don't deliver the content in a way that makes sense, you've just lost their attention and they seek out another alternative.

Adding Content and Updating Your Website

The second step after you've setup your template based website is to "just add content". However, recently, this contradicts and breaks every rule for proper website development. In fact, before you even begin to design a website you need to plan for your content strategy. You need to take a good look at your marketing plan, your market, your competition and your branding. What is your voice? How are you going to maintain that voice and govern future content? How are you going to create content that people care about and ultimately moves a person to make a purchase from you? Does your content meet your goals and your user's goals? Is your content search engine friendly? Do you have the right call-to-action? Failing to answer these and many other questions will not only make your website static and boring, but it will eventually hurt your bottom line.

Search Engine Optimization – Getting Found

Another service that comes with canned websites is the claim that you'll be found and listed high on search engine result pages. A lot of times they will also try to sell you sponsored links from an internal directory. But do they deliver?

This again brings your content into question. Search engines love relevancy. When you type in keywords you expect accurate results. This is how search engines become reliable and get used again and again. If they don't bring back relevant results, you simply stop using them. So, I'll say it again, your content strategy is so very important to consider.

There are in general two types of ways to be placed high on search pages. One is the organic way, the other is by paying for sponsored links. Organic search engine placement requires a good understanding of how search engines crawl and index your website and whether or not your conforming to their standards. This data needs to be compared to your competition and adjustments need to be made over time. (Your competition wants to be placed high on search engines too right?) Proper search engine optimization (SEO) can't be addressed by a template based website. You need to be able to have access to all your code and content without any hangups and you need to understand how to properly manage both the front end and back end of your website.

Conclusion

I know what you're thinking, you just want a website. Why does it have to be so complicated? Can't I just get away with putting my product or service online and my contact info and that should be good enough? Well we've only scratched the surface to having a successful website and it's true, it can be overwhelming. But, that is why there are people like me who specialize in building websites and direct the whole process. You can't do it yourself, we don't expect you to. Even though a canned solution is cheaper by a daily budget, in the long run you're going to be paying for dearly for it.

In this economy small businesses are on a tight budget and that's something I recognize, but proper planning, research, execution and governance of your website can benefit your business now and into the future.