Hey, Small Business Owners…Do You Know What SEO Is?

February 3, 2009

If you don’t know what SEO is, unfortunately you’re at a disadvantage to millions of small business owners that do.  Perhaps an SEO audit is just what your small business website needs to gain an advantage over the competition. Just to clarify:  SEO = Search Engine Optimization.  Still confused?  Search Engine Optimization = the tactics used to help your website rank well in search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Still not helping?  Let’s try this…if you make wedding cakes in New Hampshire and someone goes to Google and types in “wedding cakes New Hampshire”, SEO (or your site’s lack of it) is the reason that all of your competitors sites show up before your site does.  Get it now?  Good.

In this day and age of small business marketing relying so heavily on the Internet, and on search engines in particular, having a site that can be found easily in the search results is often the difference between success and failure.  As a small business owner your changes of succeeding are already pretty low and the deck is stacked against you.  Having a site that is impossible to find via the search engines all but dooms any small business to fail.

If you are a small business owner, here a few gut-check questions to ask yourself:

1. Do I have a website?  If you don’t, GET ONE NOW!  Here’s a tip:  before you EVER considering starting a small business website or hiring a website designer, READ THIS:  “How To Start A Small Business Website and Hire A Website Designer“.
2. If so, how is that website being marketed?  Search Engines?  URL on Business Cards?  YellowPages (HUGE waste of money today, by the way…)?
3. Do I know what words a potential customer is likely to use in Google to find my business?
4. If you answered “yes” to #3, ARE YOU SURE??  You’d be surprised.  Keyword research will tell you for sure…
5. Did I optimize the site myself?  (This is a trick question…you may think you have optimized the site by inputting keywords into the keywords META tag, but you’re WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!)

Optimizing a website properly involves an enormous amount of work and there are numerous best practices that must be followed in order to even have a chance of ranking well.  If you thought that a keywords META tag was all there was to it, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.  Though, surely, with billions of websites live on the Internet today you had to know there’s more to it than that.  Right?

If you’re a small business owner and have a small business website, nothing should come before SEO on your marketing checklist – NOTHING.  Having a site that can be found in the organic (or natural) search results is the difference between success and failure for 99% of small businesses today.

If you have a website already, but have no idea if or how well optimized it may be, you should have an SEO audit done.  It’s an incredibly affordable way to determine how search engine friendly your site is and what steps can be taken to improve it.

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