Want More Web Traffic? 5 Make-or-Break Tactics to Help the Search Engines Find Your Small Business (Part 2 of 2)
By Caroline Melberg
3. Communicate with Your Customers
As with all business choices, communication is absolutely important. If you come up with keywords that make sense to your industry as a whole, but aren’t words your common customers would use, you have failed.
Customers aren’t always in tune with the proper terminology of your industry. You would do well to interact often with your customers and find out how they refer to the products and services you offer in your own personal business.
This can be done when they’re in your store. It can also be done through surveys. Contacting your customers, explaining that you’re simply trying to better serve them by learning how they view your products and getting them to respond in their own terminology can give you a strong advantage in keyword advertising — with the added bonus of letting your customers know you really value their input!
While other companies may be reaching out to them just as vehemently as you are, you can sprint ahead of the competition by making your local small business easier to find according to your customer’s standards.
4. Use Honesty
A huge mistake many companies make when choosing their small business keywords is to draw people in dishonestly. Often, they’ll use keywords that are very popular and try to jump through hoops to tie those words to their own products, even if not very related. This is not good business!
Instead, offer what you have according to honest keywords. You don’t just want to draw anyone and everyone that uses the Internet. You want to draw customers that really are looking for your services. It is said by some that people who are dissatisfied with a company spread their feelings 10 times more than those who are content. If you begin to draw anyone and everyone you can pointlessly to your site, you will eventually have a large amount of people who have a simple distaste for you before they even know anything about your company.
5. Continually Reevaluate
Finally, you must recognize that language is organic. It is continually changing for a multitude of reasons. Keywords, key focuses, key everything changes based on fads, slang, trends, needs, and so on. You must continually check on how your keywords are performing.
Once you’ve found a set of keywords that work well for you, it would be good practice to reevaluate them about once a month. Check to see the popularity of those words and phrases. See if they’re no longer being used or if they’re typically being applied to something irrelevant to your company.
Your local small business is absolutely important to you. In today’s information age, your website can be equally important to your customers. If they cannot find it, you’re inevitably going to miss out on business you otherwise would have had.
There are other tips for choosing keywords, but they’re negligible compared to those mentioned here. If you want to be seen, you must remember to use phrases and location references. If you want to be seen by the most relevant customers, you’ll need to communicate with them and be honest. And finally, you must always remember that language changes — as do preferences — and you have to be able to change with it.
Entrepreneur and outdoor photography adventurer Caroline Melberg is President and CEO of Small Business Mavericks, a division of Melberg Marketing. She has over 20 years of experience creating marketing communications materials and writing copy for some of the largest and most successful companies in the world. Her small business columns are syndicated online, and she publishes the popular eZine, “Small Business Maverick Secrets.” Learn insider Maverick Marketing secrets you can use immediately to find new customers and increase your sales. When you subscribe, you’ll also get a FREE copy of her ebook, “Local Small Business Internet Marketing Secrets.”
