That may sound like an obvious question, and the majority of small business owners would answer with something like “It promotes my business online”. Whilst that is true, the majority of small business websites massively underperform due to misconceptions of how internet marketing really works.

I like to think of the Internet as one huge library where every book relates to information that someone has or is trying promote. Imagine now that hard working librarian who has to memorize where all the books are and retrieve the most relevant examples when someone requires information on a specific subject. If every website on the Internet is a book within that library, how many books there would be? Probably billions. Poor librarian!

The vital concept of online marketing is to understand how internet users access your ‘book’. Generally websites fall into two categories: the inefficient ‘type-in website’ and the efficient ‘organic search website’.

The type-in website.

You have you web address on your business cards, your newspaper adverts and probably the rest of your printed or physical marketing material. This is of course vital to your marketing plan and will drive visitors to your website that have manually typed your web address into the browser window. Rather like the library customer asking for a specific book title. Your page is loaded and all are happy. The problem with this method is the customer or internet user must have the web address and therefore must already be aware of your business. That’s great if you only sell your products to your current customer base or you can rely purely on offline marketing, but let’s face it...who has that privilege in todays markets?

Think now of that poor librarian, faced with a less definitive query typed into a search engine. Will she pull your book or another from the millions of books with marginal relevancy to the customers question? The chances are, if you have never considered optimizing your website for search engines (known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO), yours might well end up quite a way down the pile. Bad for you and bad for your business.
Unfortunately the vast majority of small business websites fall into this category, but the real fruit of internet marketing is the acquisition of new customers that were not previously aware of your business.

The organic search website.

Fortunately for us we have fantastically sophisticated librarians today called search engines whose job is to categorize every website and find out what subject it’s relevant to. Someone searching for ‘pink paper clips’ or ‘carpenters in Oxford’ will be served with a list of websites with the most relevant and prominent results to that query. This gives website owners a great opportunity that shouldn’t be underestimated.

Websites optimized for the organic search results (non paid) enjoy considerably more traffic from search engines which ultimately increases sales. Mostly overlooked or not considered whilst budgeting, small business websites lacking SEO are reduced from a potentially highly effective marketing tool to little more than an electronic business card.

Luckily SEO is no rocket science but does take a little work and understanding to get right.  True to the saying “Content is King”, if you write readable, enjoyable and informative content you’re on to a winner already. Better still is content thats regularly updated like blogs which are relevant to you business. Search engines love fresh content and a website with an enjoyable blog will outperform a typical static (never changing) business brochure site. Try writing a workshop blog if you’re an artist or articles on wood qualities if you’re a carpenter. With a little thought it should be easy to find relevant and most importantly interesting subjects to write keyword optimized articles about. Content that’s enjoyable will be read...and linked to, which improves website prominence.

Central to any optimisation is to know what you’re target audience would type in to a search engine if they wanted to find a service or product. Ask friends or relatives who are not savvy with typical industry or business insider terms what ’keywords’ they would search for. Google offers a indispensable tool for reviewing keyword search volumes to differentiate between low and high quality keywords.

A little more technical but imperative is the optimization of every page title and meta description tag on your site to be keyword rich whilst humanly readable end enticing. Get the above right and you’ll be well on your way to acquiring more search traffic to your site and business.

This is alas by no means a conclusive list of SEO techniques and really covers only the most important of over 200 factors search engines use to quantify the relevance and prominence of a given site.

If you’re unsure whether you site is optimized and performing to it’s best we offer a free SEO site audit.