If you’re a business owner or operator, you probably spend a good amount of time thinking about how you can grow your business. You worry about attracting customers to your business and keeping your current customers. If you’re a local business owner, you probably focus on the relationships you have with your customers. Many businesses that have been around for many years actually live off their word of mouth and their reputation alone. You might think that’s about the best you can do and you don’t really need to branch out. If you’re keeping your books in the black, it might feel that way, but you could always be doing better. You need to figure out how to reach customers where they are. In the 21st century, where they are is the Internet. In fact, recent research indicates that as many as 80% of people use Internet searches to find local businesses.
Customer loyalty is great and might help keep your company in business, but there are so many other deals and opportunities in the world right now. It is easy to lose your customers to some fancy website or slick video marketing strategy. You need to get your business optimised for the web.
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It is the set of techniques that makes your business more visible to search engines, which means that you show up higher in search engine results. A talented SEO company can help you develop a robust Internet platform that gets your business noticed. People are always searching for the best possible deal, even in your town. You need to figure out how to retain those local customers in the face of overwhelming competition.
How Does It Work?
Search engines send “crawlers” all over the web. They go all over the Internet, reading and cataloguing different parts of the web. For example, you sell electronic widgets, and you produce a how-to video for setting up electronic widgets. Your partners in SEO would then input a series of meta-data on the video, describing what it is and who it is for. So, when the crawler from Google sees the video and indexes the meta-data, it will index it as information pertaining to electronic widgets. Then, when someone searches for electronic widgets, your video will appear as one of the search results. The more views you have for your video, the more likely your video is to appear higher on the search results.
Also, links are important. The crawlers measure how many related articles, videos, and blogs link back to your website. So, every time an article about electronic widgets, links to your website, you are helping to improve your ranking in search results. That’s pretty much the long and the short of search engine optimisation.
So, you might not think you need search engine optimisation for your local business, but you do. There is online competition for everything these days. There are online services that will do your laundry on demand, ship your groceries, and make an appointment with a hair stylist. There’s no way to escape the way the Internet has changed business.
