Search Engine Optimization for Small Business Is a Necessity, Not a Luxury

Search marketing and search engine optimization for small business may sound like another fancy-pants way of fleecing you of scarce marketing dollars, especially if your small business is encountering tight budgets and increased competition in this harsh economic climate. In fact, we at Get Page One are 100% certain that some of the “search engine optimization for small business” pitches you see are 100% scams.

However, we also believe that quality search engine optimization (SEO) can make a huge difference to medium-sized and small businesses with customers who use the internet to find products and services. I.e., nearly everybody.

And the co-founder of our humble SEO company, Brian Rutledge, will be talking about search engine optimization for small business at the SEM for SMB conference in Austin, TX. More on that later!

What Search Engine Optimization for Small Business Can Do

We run into a lot of medium-sized and small business owners who don’t see the need for search engine optimization. “We don’t sell anything on the web,” they say. “We don’t get business from our website.” “We don’t sell technology.” “Our customers don’t use the web much.” “Our customers know how to find us.” “Our web designer is already doing SEO.” “We saw an ad for guaranteed search engine optimization that costs $50 a month.” “We don’t have a website.” And of course, our favorite: “We don’t have the budget.”

This blog isn’t a sales blog. I’m not writing this to sell you our services; I blog to share SEO knowledge and to chat about funny things in this digital life of ours. But still, I feel I have to address all of these common excuses. My disclaimer: it’s okay if you don’t choose us for your small business’ search engine optimization provider. We’re cool with that. But we like people to understand what search engine optimization is all about. We’re little internet marketing evangelists. The more people understand SEO, the easier our job becomes.

“We don’t sell anything on the web.”

The majority of our clients don’t sell anything on their websites. But they do sell products or services. And people find products and services on the web.

“We don’t get business from our website. Our customers know how to find us.”

This is a popular one. Some businesses do build a website solely as a service to their existing customers, like a digital sign that points people to an address or phone number. Of course, this begs the question: Do you want business from your website? Can your website do more than just shunt people to a phone number? Do you know how many customers are currently visiting your website or how many are non-repeat visitors? (Yes, this information is easy to see and free to track.) Are your competitors getting business from their websites? Do you want more business?

Some small businesses actually don’t want more business. My mechanic routinely turns people away. He’s happy with his current volume of customers. Good for him. If he came to us looking for search engine optimization for small business, we’d tell him we couldn’t help him.

“We don’t sell technology.”

Do you sell a product or service that people don’t search for on the web? Are you sure?

There are still some things that people don’t shop for on the web. People usually don’t look for a grocery store or a gas station on the web. They assign more value to proximity, and aren’t concerned about differentiators.

Not that search engine optimization for small business can’t help such entities. Gas stations and grocery stores usually belong to chains that have elaborate websites with a variety of customer loyalty and marketing projects going at all times. If they don’t, they might benefit from a strong web presence that emphasizes what separates them from the big boys. And that web presence probably needs search engine optimization for small business.

“Our customers don’t use the web much.”

Usually this comes from small businesses whose customers aren’t young or well-heeled. Do you know what the web usage statistics are for the elderly and the less affluent? Do you really know your demographics? Do you know the web traffic statistics for your website? Do you want more affluent customers in the 18-45 demographic?

“Our web designer is already doing SEO.”

We love in-house web designers. Many of them are experts at what they do, and partner with us smoothly in the implementation of good search engine optimization for small business.

But keep in mind that your web designer probably already has a full plate keeping the site running and up to date. She probably does some graphic design and IT work for you, too, right? (You know she does.) And with all these different priorities, do you think search engine optimization for small business is at the top of her daily to-do list?

And if your web designer happens to be untrained in search engine optimization, do you think she’ll say, “Hey, boss, I’m not sure what kind of file hierarchy to use for SEO” or spend hours restructuring the current site for better searchability? Would she seek out additional training when you’re already running her ragged? Probably not.

Good SEO needs constant maintenance and refinement, especially since it requires dogged, meticulous reverse-engineering to figure out the best techniques. You see, the search engines don’t tell us what search engine optimization processes work the best. We have to figure it out ourselves through grueling trial and error. But with experience and determination, it’s possible. To us, search engine optimization for small business isn’t a hobby; it’s a calling.

“We don’t have a website.”

Do you want a website? Do your customers ask about your website? Do your competitors have websites?

At Get Page One, we’ve developed a high-powered content management system (CMS) with our own SEO and useability enhancements. Because we’ve already built the software system, we can perform strategic website development at a fraction of the cost of boutique web design firms. For our bigger clients, we sometimes build their entire website at no cost because it makes it easier for us to do our job of search engine optimization.

“We don’t have the budget.”

People think SEO is expensive because it’s new and has its own weird acronym. Not true.

We’re pretty proud of the value proposition we offer to search engine optimization for small business clients. Simply put, we’re not high-priced consultants, and our SEO work can pay for itself in new business several times over.

In fact, we proposed to one client that we’d give them free SEO services in exchange for a percentage of the new profits they were getting from their increased web traffic. They turned us down politely. They knew they were earning too much from the new business we were bringing in.

“We saw an ad for guaranteed search engine optimization that costs $50 a month.”

This one makes us grieve. SEO scams like this give all a bad name to all search engine optimization for small business. They prey on people who don’t fully understand what good SEO involves. At best, they’ll take your money doing superficial things that don’t actually affect your search engine ranking. At worst, they’ll sell you unnecessary services and pull dirty tricks that will get your website banned from Google, Yahoo and MSN.

SEM for SMB Conference! Get Page One Co-Founder to Speak on Search Engine Optimization for Small Business

Our co-founder, Brian Rutledge, a leader in the use of search-engine-approved “white hat” SEO techniques, will be speaking at the SEM for SMB conference, July 16-17, 2008, which was organized specifically to help guide small business owners through the confusing maze of SEO, SEM, and PPC. It’ll take place at the downtown Austin Hilton.

“Search engine marketing for small businesses” is more than just a buzzphrase,” Brian says. “If your small business has a website, then you should be aware of SEO basics. If you are willing to learn some fundamentals of search marketing, the entry costs are very low in comparison with the potential gains. In today’s competitive markets, if you’re not doing SEO, you’re losing money.” Rutledge will also address some of the shady SEO practices that small businesses need to watch out for.

So if you’ll be in Austin this summer, check out this presentation on search engine optimization for small business. It should be a great networking event and Brian’s a lively and informative speaker.

Austin Pizza: Where are the major chains in Google SERPs?

“Austin Pizza“. It seems fairly logical that at some time in the last few years, someone, anyone, working for Pizza Hut, Dominos or Mr. Gatti’s would have said, “hey, what happens when someone searches for pizza in their city?” Because, frankly, nothing happens, and that amazes me.

I could understand, I guess, that pizza executives might not see the value of the interwebs. For that matter, they might not even use the internet to look for things like pizza. After all, isn’t the internet just something the “kids” play around on. You know, college kids killing time between classes or late at night instead of studying … and what is the target demographic of these pizza companies? Oh, wait …

Where are Pizza Company Ad Agencies?

What I don’t understand - what I can’t grasp - is where are their ad agencies? The main goal of an ad agency, if I’m not mistaken, is to sell more product. I realize they are working on brand awareness, etc. (I happily await your flames :), but if I own a pizza company, I want my agency to sell more pizza. Speaking as someone who searches for everything from his BlackBerry, the first pizza company to show up in my SERPs is the one that gets my call.

It just boils down to, once again, advertising agencies not understanding search. (Just one more example of how little understanding they have of search: I can’t even Google up the current agency representing Pizza Hut. If one were representing Pizza Hut, seems one would want the whole world to know about it.)

Google Loves Pizza

Google loves pizza. In fact, Google loves anything that is relevant to keyphrases its users are looking for. Google wants these companies to show up in the SERPs. Dominos, Pizza Hut and Mr. Gatti’s are all really, really relevant results for someone looking for pizza in Austin. So, since Google loves pizza and relevant results, why is it so hard to Google up some pizza at 3 am?

Pizza Chains and Google Organic Ranking

Well, Dominos achieves the amazing feat of hiding all its pizza stores from Google by having a store locator that requires you to type your address, city and state into a form and click “find”. They provide no crawlable means of discovering any of their zillion stores. Pizza Hut uses the same strategy to keep Google at bay. Papa John’s, ditto. (Did someone have a fire sale on this interface?)

Mr. Gatti’s, smallest entity in our sample, has, believe it or not, a crawlable store locator, yet they still manage to thwart ol’ Googlebot. How? Well, they have bad URL’s, code, text, H tag selections, meta tags (for a unique location, meta name=”description” content=”Gatti’s Pizza” / and meta name=”keywords” content=”pizza, restaurant”), page content… etc.

In fact, the only thing these pizza chains aren’t doing to keep Google out is forbidding access in their robots.txt file. They aren’t, are they?

Submit Business Locations to Google Local

I’ll play my own devil’s advocate here for a minute. Maybe the user experience, design or GUI is more important that organic search. Maybe they don’t want to build a crawlable directory of store locations for fear that a user might actually find it on Google.

Maybe these things are important. Maybe arguments such as “that person would never have become a customer if they hadn’t been able to Google your less than ideal locator page” should just be put aside. What then?

Well, there’s an extremely simple solution to these arguments. Google Local.

It’s incredibly easy to submit your business to Google Local. I submitted ours in 10 minutes. I submitted an excel spreadsheet with a listing of a client’s 500 locations in less than an hour. In fact, I’m guessing an agency could have an intern submit every Pizza Hut location in the world in less than a day. So, in less than a day (and the month it takes for the submitted locations to show up in Google Local), Pizza Hut could begin showing up for every variation of “city”+pizza. This would tap into a HUGE long tail keyphrase list and translate directly into increased sales of pizza … for the cost of an intern’s day. There is no excuse.

What’s that? You’re not interested in long tail, only high-volume keyphrases? Don’t get me started on the lack of SEO for pizza coupons.

Advertising Agencies Don’t Get SEO, Part 1 of a 2,000,000 Part Series

Let’s start this off by pointing out that it’s now April 2008.

In a recent 7 month study involving over three hundred brands, including the likes of Procter & Gamble’s Folgers and Pampers, it was learned that:

Google, Yahoo and MSN react differently to changes in content and inbound links.

Wow. Really?

It’s a good thing all that money was spent on a 7 month study of 300 brands in multiple languages to figure out something the SEO community has known since, oh, I don’t know, 1998.

SEO is something most little guys, even this little store in Austin selling cowboy boots (sorry, couldn’t pass up the link opportunity) understands well. SEO is not brain surgery. For that matter, SEO is not really even all that hard. It just requires effort beyond sending the work down the line to your AdWords buyer and making a few power points for the client.

Ad Agencies, please call your local SEO (just pick one, really) I don’t care if you hire them (or me) or not. Seriously. Just call them, ask a few questions. You might be amazed at what you learn.

It won’t even take 7 months.

Google Maps adds “Send to Garmin” - Garmin Adds Google Local Search

It sounds like a big game of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”, but the end result is a great boost in functionality for end users of both Google Maps and Garmin GPS devices, including Garmin Mobile subscription service for the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices.

Google “Send to Garmin”

The Google “Send to Garmin” feature works pretty much just like it sounds. You map out your route using Google maps, including any points of interest you might want to see along the way, such as this cool store for high end cowboy boots in Austin, and then simply click the “send to Garmin” button. Easy Peasy.

Google Local Search on Garmin Mobile

Alternatively, if you use the Garmin Mobile subscription service, you can now use it to directly search Google local to find those cool points of interest such as the cheapest gas or even the best Barbecue in the world (it’s so good, I’m giving them that link and they’re not even a client

Google Maps on BlackBerry

Or, as an alternative to the above, if you have a BlackBerry with a GPS (also supported on many other phones, but I can’t vouch for them), you can save yourself some money and simply download the excellent Google Maps for Mobile application. I got a new BlackBerry (OMG, would someone please write them a letter explaining search engine friendly urls?) with Tele-Nav and tried that once. I then tried Google Maps for mobile and never even launched Tele-Nav again. My one caveat, if you need turn by turn talking navigation, Google Maps can’t help you…yet, though I can’t imagine they aren’t working on that.

Overall, “send to Garmin” is a good idea. I just think it’s a better idea to simply install Google Maps on your phone in the first place.

Well, the Google Street View team is certainly busy. They launched Street View for Austin, and caught a street view shot of Get Page One that’s pretty recent. The building next door is finished now, but they just took down that scaffolding last week.

Street view is fun, they catch lots of strange things on camera. It’s a great way to kill a few hours until, say, happy hour on Friday

It’s a first, the Google Webmaster Help Group Chat. Big G is actually going to talk to webmasters about how to improve their website’s position in the search results! Why is this such a big deal? Well, Google can be the typical evasive, faceless, “please refer to the help pages” monster corporation. This is a huge shift in how they deal with webmasters. Hopefully, it will last.

(edit, if you didn’t copy the webex Q&A chat window before it closed, you can borrow my copy of the Google Webmaster Help Group Chat Q&A Transcript)

What’s going on at the Google Webmaster Help Group Chat

8:45 Doors open
This is a great time to get logged in to the chat!
9:05 Welcome!
Introductions, and how to get the most out of the event.
9:15 Site Clinic: Emphasis on good fundamentals
We’ll examine and give feedback on one of your sites.
9:40 Advanced topic: Images in search results
Presented by our own Maile Ohye.
9:50 Additional Q&A time
We guides will tackle your questions about images and other webmaster issues
10:00 End
Time to say goodbye.

The official information page about how to attend the Google webmaster help group chat live page is here.

How Open is this New “Open Attitude?”

Just how open is this new “open” attitude Google seems to be taking with webmasters? Well, I’m as curious as you are. Are they going to give out any “SEO secrets”? Any Search Marketing tips, tricks and techniques? Maybe they are just going to go with their old fallback of “create good content blah, blah” I guess we’ll know soon enough. And if you aren’t going to be able to make it, you can read about it here. I’m going to be “blogging” the Google Webmaster Help Group Chat live as it unfolds. Stay tuned to hear more…

Google Webmaster Help Group Chat Starting in 5 Minutes

Hopefully, they will be starting in 5 minutes. Still can’t log in. Wondering if they will be having problems, as they themselves say, “There will be bumps. We’ve planned and practiced, but inevitably a (technological, meteorological, philosophical or other) snafu will pop up… especially in v1. We’ll do our best to keep things running smoothly, and we thank you in advance for your understanding :-).” As just about everything else is at Google, the event is labeled “beta”. Gotta’ love the Google attitude!

Google Webmaster Help Group Chat Begins

One of the first ones in, one minute early, Matt Cutts beat me though! The list of people is really adding up. This might just be a popular event Quite a few peeps from Google are logged in as well. They brought the troops. Right now it’s Adam Lasnik, John Meuller, Maile Ohye, Matt Cutts, Susan Maskwa and several one namers. I can hear lots of typing…

Adam is announcing that people can’t chat with each other…the first “snafu”. Beginning in 7 minutes.

Now They’re Talkin

Starting to chat away. One of the very first messages, “What’s up, all my SEO people”. Well, they’re definitely acknowledging us. They’ve fixed the chat room, everyone can chat with everyone. Not sure that’s such a great idea.

The Phone call begins

Guidelines:

no specific sites
info about presenter
general issues

Presenters:

Adam Lasnik is the “Search Evangelist”.
Jessica, search quality
Myli, search engineer
Reed, search quality
Evan, search quality
MattD, search quality team
Matt Cutts, Web spam, search quality
Susan, webmaster trends analyst
John Muir, webmaster trends analyst
Maria, who can’t talk…in Ireland
Johnathan Simon, webmaster trends analyst

Sorry didn’t get full names and titles, they were going fast. If anyone has them, send them in and I’ll add them.

Google Webmaster Help Group Chat Site Clinic

Starting to review Pictureline.com

Now they popped open a window with the web-browser…it took over the computer for a second, thankfully they’re nuking that idea. They say they planned this…hmm.

Now with the tips:

Not sure I agree with some of it. One of the guys/gals said the site name is not in the title, so people might not be able to find that site. I disagree somewhat. Google knows who PictureLine is, so it’s not necessary for ranking. Maybe he was saying people can’t find the specific company in the SERPs b/c of that?

Lots of “look and feel” stuff. Width of site, UI type things…Why are search engine engineers doing a UI review?? We want juicy SEO info!

Now with accessibility tips…oh, hey…there you go, a good tip. One of the guys/gals mentioned to not have javascript in the main navigation. Great point, but nothing new. Says to have text links, not graphical, and to have alt tags. All good points.

Johnathan:

choose www or non-www, points out you can do that in webmaster tools
fix duplicate url’s
make sure sitemap has no broken links
make sure sitemap is in robots.txt
mentions load times…this is a new one and important

Reed:

Found duplicate content, apparently they moved the site from somewhere else…oops!

Next site: learningguitarnow.com

Hints:

True 404’s in headers
301 redirects to WWW domains are good
fix alt attributes in blog
upgrade to newest version of wordpress
embedded youtube video, have an html link directly to the video

Next site:

digitalbase.eu
alt tags, blah, blah
versions of the site: he has multiple versions of the site, use 301 redirects to get rid of that.
titles, make more compelling…not really search engine optimization info, but a good point
windows IIS server, url’s can be upper and lower case, this is not good

Interesting side note…there is a Q&A chat that seems to be a completely different meeting. It’s been commandeered by someone with question after question to Matt Cutts about her site. I understand why she would take the opportunity, I’d do just about anything if one of our sites had been dumped by Google, but I think in the future they need to be more strict about “no personal site questions” or it’s going to get out of hand.

More technical problems…phone out…now they’re back.

Now we’re on to the Image search portion of the meeting.

Discussing how to optimize for Google image search results.

Starting with discussion of how image works, how to use the tools, filtering, etc. Nothing about how to rank better (grammer is losing out to speed here, sorry).

Tips:

How Google Ranks Images

Quality of the site
Img attributes, alt text
Image filename
Domain referrer and the image’s host site…hotlinking…don’t do it!
Make images accessible. NO FLASH! No Flash slideshow
Don’t duplicate the image by having Flash and the same image, dilute’s page rank
Image size is important, large images rank higher
Write relevant text around your image, very important
Alt and title tags both? Yes
Use descriptive file names
Not important to have in sitemap.xml

Now the Juicy SEO Tips

Sitelinks:
Triggered algorithmically
You can remove individual site links
Create more original and compelling content (I called that one)

Apparently, that was pretty much it…

Now they’re discussing how to get more information, go to Google Webmaster Tools, of course!

Oh, hey, they are going to stick around and help us more…Google Rocks!

Universal search and video:

They only show sites with really high bandwidth in the serps, that’s why Google shows Youtube in the serps
Create video sitemap

Bought links:

If you BUY or SELL links, and they pass page rank, they are emphasizing that they will either “lose trust in your site” or remove you altogether.

Look at your backlinks from webmaster tools to make sure there aren’t any bought links.

Subdomains:

When should I use subdomains? When it makes sense for your users. Basically, if you have a large sections, not single pages, use subdomains. They say single pages don’t work.

Personally, I think there are a lot of examples showing that is NOT CORRECT.

rant
Subdomain landing or doorway pages work, which is unfortunate, because they’re spammy and lessen the quality of the SERPs. It’s also unfortunate because we ceased using sub-domains for SEO when Matt Cutts said to, and apparently we should have “kept on keepin’ on”. I wish Google would put the same smack-down on these guys they are hitting the paid link people with!
/rant

Duplicate content?
no answer, common sense test

How many links on a page?
no more than 100

How long should pages be?
no answer, common sense test

Blogging:

Discussing spam prevention, etc. nofollows, etc. Take care of your blog and maintain a good neighborhood.

What if you bought links and can’t get them removed?
Submit reconsideration request with as much detail as you can

Page Rank Sculpting, good or bad?
Don’t bother, site architecture is the most important thing.
Again, SITE ARCHITECTURE is really important.

Splogs:

De-prioritize in favor of other concentrating on main site.

Aggregators like Digg:

rank high, but as they fall off home page they lessen in importance.

However, note that the Digg to this blog post was ranking in the top 10 for google webmaster help group chat before the event was even over. If you’re in a hurry, Digg is the way to go.

Submitting Spam Reports:

Spam reports from webmaster tools are prioritized. Cool.

When will Webmaster tools telling us if we are penalized?

They want to be careful to not aid spammers, so probably not going to warn about much, but they do show some things, and sound like they’re going to show others.

Ok, well, that’s it. A user going by the name of SchoolsGalore said he was recording the event in it’s entirety. I’ll try to find a link to that.

Thanks, Google, for a great session. It ended up being very helpful, and I’m sure the 250+ attendees appreciated it tremendously. I’m just amazed there weren’t more.

Any questions, comments? Contact us!