Why Business Owners Struggle With Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is an interesting topic among business owners. On the one hand, many of them love it. The Internet has made it possible to bring thousands upon thousands of new buyers to their websites from all over the world, at any hour of the day or time of the year.

On the other hand, a lot of business owners hate the search engine optimization process. How can they be so excited about the results, and at the same time so annoyed with what it takes to get them?

It’s easier to understand than you might think. That’s because executing a successful search engine optimization plan is a little bit like dieting – it’s a slow, tedious, and occasionally painful process that usually only pays big dividends after you’ve been doing it for a while. And what’s worse, the longer you put it off, the longer you usually have to wait to get into the right kind of shape.

Just as most of us would love to shovel down hot fudge sundaes and still look great in swimwear, the average business owner can barely wait to see all the new leads or sales they’re going to rack up once their search engine optimization plan starts to pay off. But in the meantime, it can be frustrating to keep generating ideas for content, viewing regular traffic reports, and yes, paying web design firms and search engine specialists for the guidance they provide.

In other words, having a great SEO plan is almost priceless, but writing blog posts, articles, and checks in the meantime can quickly get old.

Our advice to you is this: Find a team that truly understands search engine optimization and how it fits into your bottom-line business plan, and then give them whatever they need to get started. Recognize from the outset that it’s going to be a little bit painful and frustrating… but that you’ll be glad you made the right decision when tons of new business starts rolling in.

How Much Should You be Reading Into Web Analytics?

Amongst the business owners we work with, we tend to find that clients fall into one of two groups: those who pay little or no attention to the analytics coming from their business websites, and those who pay way too much attention to the statistics.

So how much should you be reading into web analytics? The short answer is that you should be watching just closely enough to spot any trends and increase your profitability. To see what we mean, consider the following examples:

  • A high bounce rate on one page or another could indicate that a stronger call to action is needed, that visitors are finding the information on that page confusing, or that you don’t have enough links to other resources.
  • Knowing which pages visitors typically arrive on and leave your site from could help you optimize them for conversions, but only if you have a sense of what keywords they searched to get there, and what they were looking for (and didn’t find) when they departed.
  • Having insight into which pages on your site are regularly bookmarked or e-mailed to others could show you which pieces of content visitors find most valuable, and which product areas you should expand on.

These are only a few examples, but they point to the need for balance. Having only half of the information about any of these issues – or none at all – could easily lead you to the wrong conclusions. On the other hand, reading too much into them, or changing your plans after only a couple of weeks of results, could prove disastrous.

In the end, our best advice is to get the best analytics package you can, but also to get expert advice and guidance when it comes to understanding the figures you see. After all, you do need lots of information to keep your business growing online… but what good is any of it if it isn’t helping you to increase sales?

SEO Tips for Business Owners

Are you a business owner that doesnt have a full time web or seo person? Here are some tips that can help you improve your rankings that you can do on your own.

1.) Get your vendors or customers to put a link on their point to your website.

Getting 1 way in bound links for relevant websites is very important and can make a big difference. Links should only be from relevant website and the link anchor text should closely match the keywords that you would like to rank well for. For example, if I wanted a customer to post a link back to my website, it might say “Website Design & SEO” and if you click the link it opens my home (epicwebaz.com).

2.) Update your website on a regular basis with fresh compelling content

Google an all major search engines don’t like old stale websites. Search engines love fresh content that isn’t found anywhere else on the internet. Don’t ever duplicate anyones content and always make sure that you are writing your own content. Copying content from other web pages is considered duplicate content and is an easy way to get penalized or even banned from the search engine. One way of of adding fresh content is setting up a blog (wordpress, joomla, etc..).

3.) Social media

Most all social media is free, so you should always take advantage of it. Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in etc… can be a valuable tool for most business’s i. Following basic marketing practices with these is essential.

  • Only post business related information
  • Offer deals or discounts to try and guage ROI from these services
  • Use common sense when utilizing these tools, everyone can see what your posting so keep it clean.

Also, checkout HootSuite.com, this tool will help you manage all your social media and integrate it into one dashboard.

4.) Use Google Analytics, it’s free and powerful

Google Analytics gives you valuable information about your website such as keyword traffic, referring websites, bounce rate, etc… This tool is free and fairly easy to setup, contact your webmaster and have them install a small piece of tracking code on each page you want to track and just sit back and wait. After a few days you can analyze your traffic and make changes to your content to target different visitors.

5.) Don’t use a lot of flash

Flash looks great, and if used in moderation can make a website really pop but is also a double edged sword. Search engines at this point in time can’t really index websites that are all flash because they contain no text. The basis of search engine algorithms is that they crawl every website on the internet, index the text and rank you based on certain factors in relation to that text. If there is no text to index, then you can’t rank for anything. If you have a full flash website, just make sure you have an html version made and modify your robots.txt file to exclude the flash version from being crawled. Having an HTML version is also handy for people with slower connections.

I will be adding more tips as I go, but here are a few free resources that can be used to help your website rank better. These are intended for anyone with basic computer/internet knowledge. If you would like a free SEO or website analysis please call me.

Thanks

Nick Julia

Office: 623-252-3584