Small Business Design Resources

Keeping An Eye on the Competition

In order to keep your small business practices up-to-date, it’s important to keep an eye on the competition. You’ll learn what the latest trends are, find out what’s working and what’s not, and remain responsive to what your customers want and expect from businesses like yours. Fortunately, there are several easy ways to learn about your competitors.

It may sound counterintuitive, but it’s important to learn as much as you can about how your visitors browse your website. If most of your visitors leave before making a purchase, you can bet that there are competing sites that they find easier to use. ClickTale is a great tool that lets you see exactly how visitors use your site, so you can pinpoint what is working and what is not. Looking at visitor browsing patterns will show you what visitors want and expect to see on your site–not only will this help you make changes to retain your visitors, it will also provide important clues about what competitors’ websites offer.

Analyzing your website’s statistics and the behavior of your visitors is an essential part of staying competitive, but what about the people who aren’t visiting your site? Some of your potential customers are visiting competing sites instead, and services like Compete.com can help you discover why. Compete offers access to multiple ways to analyze your competition. You can learn what keywords your competitors are optimizing for, see their site traffic history and other competitive analytics, compare your search marketing performance, and learn which sites on the Internet excel in ways you’re trying to emulate.

You should also take advantage of services like Google Alerts, which will deliver the latest news on your competitors straight to your email inbox. Set up an alert for any topic you wish to monitor–like the name of your competitor’s business, product, or targeted keywords–and keep up-to-date on the latest Internet buzz.

Checking out your competitors’ social media presence is another way to learn about them and how they’re using this newer marketing tool. Look to see if your competitors have Facebook or Twitter profiles and what they’re doing with them. If they have a lot of followers and good interaction with them, that’s a sign that they’ve found an effective way to attract your target audience. Also try searching for their website’s URL on bookmarking sites like delicious.com and Digg.com–you can find out who’s bookmarking and recommending your competitors sites and what tags they are using to identify them.

Quick Tip: Update Your Website Often

Updating your website often keeps your website fresh in search engines. When I say update I’m not talking about a constant redesign, I’m referring to content. Search engines love text, so the more often your website has fresh content for them to scan, the more “points” your website gets for being an up-to-date source for visitors. The best way to add content to your website is by publishing articles on your blog of course. Learn more about What is Blogging.

Make the Most of Your Small Business Advertising Dollars

Advertising can be expensive, and it can also be ineffective–as a small business owner, you want to be absolutely sure that you don’t combine those two and end up spending a lot on advertising only to see a minimal (or negative) return on investment. Luckily, the rise of the Internet has resulted in many low-cost advertising options that are perfect for small business owners.

What’s on the top of our list for the best return on investment? A professional business website. These days a website is indispensable for any small business; while potential customers once consulted the Yellow Pages to find you, the Internet is now their first–and often only–stop. Many small business owners attempt a do-it-yourself website without realizing that professionals specializing in small business design are an excellent return on investment. Think of it as the difference between a single-line listing in the phone book and a full-page, color ad. Which business is going to get noticed? The one whose website looks professional, is on the first page of search engine results, and provides useful content. Investing in a professional with expertise in small business design can help you achieve that, and will quickly pay for itself.

But don’t stop at a website–there are other ways to harness the advertising power of the Internet. Word of mouth has always been one of the most cost-effective forms of advertisement, and social networking sites are the new word of mouth. These sites are reaching more people than ever and are usually free to join. Maintaining a business profile on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other sites is an inexpensive way to build an Internet presence and keep your customers up-to-date. You can even create your own television-style ads and post them on Youtube for free. Feature them on your website and your Facebook page and you might be the next viral video phenomenon! In addition to creating your own profile, connect with other people and businesses whose followers are likely to be interested in your product or services. Become visible to their followers by commenting on their profiles or blogs and leaving a link to your website.

Placing ads on the Internet can also be a good investment if you choose their location and style carefully. Choose which websites to advertise on by keeping your target audience in mind–just like with physical signage, you want to place your ads in locations that potential customers frequent. Finding the most effective placement is easy with sites like BuySellAds.com, which will help you find a target website or blog for your ads or offer advertising space on your own website. The best way to maximize your advertising dollars using Internet advertising is to start small and take advantage of the statistics available to you. There are a variety of tools available that will help you determine where your website traffic is coming from, which customers are buying what, and which ads are most effective. A lot of these tools are free, but staying on top of your Internet advertising statistics does require an investment of your time. However, it’s one that’s well worth it–you can learn what advertising methods work for you before you invest significant money.

Finally, advertising to your current customers is always a good idea. Connect with them via social networking sites, send them a monthly newsletter updating them about your business, and keep your website updated with fresh content, deals and information of interest to them. If you haven’t already, start building an email list for email marketing. Your customers are already interested in you and your business, so you know that you’re reaching a receptive audience. Cultivating their interest will encourage them to be repeat customers and make them more likely to recommend you to their friends.

Quick Tip: Link Correctly to Your Homepage

It’s very important for SEO purposes that you link to your homepage correctly. Basically when you link from your inner pages or another website back to your homepage you must be sure that you’re linking directly to the root address, in other words link directly to your domain name.

So for example if your homepage is saved as home.html DON’T link to yourwebsite.com/home.html instead, just link to yourwebsite.com

This helps search engines such as Google to index and rank your pages correctly. When you’re sending some visitors to yourwebsite.com/home.html and others to yourwebsite.com the search engines see that as two separate pages which is not good SEO practice.

Get Your Website Better Positioned in Google for Good Result

With more and more consumers and businesses starting their search for services online, businesses today must have a well designed, easy to navigate, user-friendly website. Small business website design is no longer a luxury – it has become a necessity. If your website is cluttered, slow or difficult to navigate, your web visitors will simply bounce back and move on to your competitors.

An important element of website creation and website design is to make sure that your website is not just nice-looking, but also SEO friendly. You want search engines, and especially the King of search engines Google, to point searchers to your site when they perform a search that is relevant to your business. For example, if you sell custom wedding invitations on your site, you want people who go online and type the keyword “custom wedding invitations” in the Google search box to land on your site. This is only going to happen if your site appears on the 1-3 first pages of search results.

But how do you make it happen? How do you convince Google to place your site high on the search engine result pages (SERPs)?

There are several ways to get your website better positioned in Google. While there are never any guarantees when it comes to search engine optimization, usually employing all of the following methods WILL eventually result in an improvement in your search engine rankings.

You will need to wait patiently, though. Time is a big factor when it comes to Google because older sites are more trusted by Google while new sites are almost always deemed as suspicious.

On-Page SEO

The first step is quite simple. You need to let search engines know what your site is about. If you sell scented soaps, for example, but your site doesn’t mention the term “scented soaps,” there’s no reason why search engines will position your site high on the SERPs for this term, is there? So make sure your title tags and your site’s content (ideally your URL too) include your main keywords. Don’t worry too much about “keyword density” or how many times you should repeat the keyword – just write naturally, but remember to frequently use your main keywords in your writing.

Blog

Adding a blog to your site is a great way to add fresh, optimized content that includes your main keywords. Adding fresh content encourages Google to crawl and index your site more often, which is obviously a good thing. In addition, a website rich in content enables you to reinforce your main keywords. Most ecommerce websites, for example, have very little content, which makes it difficult for search engines to index them correctly. Adding a blog to such a website can make a real difference in terms of how your site will be positioned by Google.

Off-Page SEO

Off page SEO is the links your site receives from other sites. It is an extremely important component of SEO when it comes to Google, because the Google algorithm places a huge importance on a site’s reputation, and the more links you have pointing at your site, especially links from reputable sites, the more reputable it will be as far as Google is concerned, and the better it will be positioned in the SERPs.

There are several ways to get links to your site, which I discuss in my post about link building. Whatever you do, stay away from spammy sites and from paid links (Google has declared a war on paid links and punishes sites who use them) and place an emphasis on getting links naturally by creating quality content and spreading it in social media.

The combination of creating high quality content for your site and engaging in social media creates natural links overtime because it builds relationships with people who have blogs and websites and who might link to your site if they like your content.

Getting your website better positioned in Google takes time – often several months or even longer if your website is brand new. In the meantime, be patient! If you have a high quality, well-designed website and play by the rules, your efforts will eventually pay off.