SEO and Social Marketing For Small Business Pitfalls and Some Concrete Solutions
If you are a small business owner, you very likely already know that search optimization (SEO) and social marketing (facebook especially) can be important for your business, but perhaps you do not quite know where to begin. Unfortunately, unscrupulous individuals have entered the market with promises of success in both areas for exorbitant fees. In this article, we will simply outline the basics of SEO and Social Marketing with solutions. If you have an interest in learning more about these items, a free digital book download is available on our website (www.ocoos.com). A hard copy is also available on Amazon (HERE).
Search Marketing:
As you build the website for your business, you need to keep in mind your primary objective: bringing people to it, so they are aware of what you offer and why they should do business with you. The fundamentals of Internet search are that a user enters keywords, and the search engine finds a list of websites that related to those keywords. As a business owner, you want your company to appear on the first page of those search results, either through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
SEO is the process of increasing the rank of a website or a web page in a search engine's natural, organic search results. SEM (which may use SEO) is a form of Internet marketing that involves promoting websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results through paid search and advertising.
What should you do to optimize your website for search engines? You need to make it easy to access and catalog your website. This can be done simply by having the right content on your website, and communicating your intent to Google with a Google My Business account.
The key to SEO is not fancy technology, but rather a good understanding of your customer. The critical question you should ask is: “What is my customer going to put into the search prompt when they are looking for a service like mine?” If you use a leading edge website platform such as Ocoos, your business intent will be communicated to the search engines. Business intent is simply explaining clearly to the search engines and more importantly to the final consumer your business.
Social Marketing:
Facebook is the dominant social marketing platform. Fundamentally, Facebook is very simple. Members create a personal profile; then they determine who their friends are, who can see details about them, and who can see the articles they post on their Facebook pages. Facebook’s homepage is set up to resemble a newsfeed, with the news made up of everything your friends have posted to their Facebook pages. Items in a News Feed can be liked, disliked, and commented on by anyone seeing them, creating ongoing conversations among groups of friends.
From a business owner point-of-view, there is something very important to understand. Facebook tries to predict what members would like to see in their newsfeed, and it filters updates based on these predictions. Currently, less than 10% of your updates to YOUR friends have a chance of making it to them. This means spending a lot of energy building friends is not very useful. You might as well collect emails and get to them directly. If you want to use Facebook advertising to reach clients you do not know, this maybe ok depending on the targeting you can get for your customer.
Conclusion:
What is the net-net ?
Build a website with good content aimed at your desired customer
Make sure the website has enough text for Google to find your website.
Do Build a Google My Business Account.
Forget SEO merchants
Don’t focus on building a large number of Facebook Friends
Forget Social Media merchants
If you think Facebook can help with getting NEW clients, use Facebook advertising.
Collect emails for current clients, and communicate directly through emails.
Use Linkedin if your customer is there as well.
