Small business owners often struggle to find cost-effective ways to market their business.    Old school tactics like direct mail and email campaigns, billboards, and print advertising are expensive, ineffective, and outdated for one simple reason:  they require business owners to spend money pushing their product or service on people who simply aren’t in the market for it.

The Internet is a small business owner’s dream come true because it allows you to market your products and services exclusively to people who are looking for them!  What’s more, if you know what you’re doing, you can effectively market your business for a fraction of the price of traditional methods.

Small Business Online Marketing Traps

Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to lose a lot of money on internet marketing if you don’t know what you’re doing.  In particular, hiring a bad web designer can be catastrophic.  Additionally, Google makes it very easy to drop hundreds or thousands of dollars on Adwords ads that don’t convert to business for you.

Here’s what you need to know in order to compete in today’s online marketplace:

Choose your web designer carefully

The ability to market yourself online cost-effectively starts with a good web site.  A good web site is one that not only looks professional, but also shows up in search engine results. After all, if Google can’t find you, nobody else can either.

Therefore, it’s  important to hire a web designer who is familiar with the basics of designing a search engine friendly site.  Make sure your web designer:

• uses text-based navigation (not image-based or javascript navigation)
• uses a full css layout, not a table-based layout
• writes unique title tags for every page of your site
• uses search-engine friendly urls or permalinks, not long, dynamically-generated urls containing a lot of question marks and equal signs
• writes a unique description for every page
• includes a site map
• only uses one H1 heading on each page
• uses your keywords in your titles and headings

Hiring a designer who is not familiar with the basics of search engine optimization is a waste of money. You can easily weed out the really bad ones (without having to resort to a lot of technical jargon) by asking them if they use javascript-powered menus or table-based layouts.  If they say yes to either question, spend your money somewhere else.

Choose good keywords, and use them wisely

Before you hire a web designer or write a word of copy for your web site, it’s important to put some thought and research into your keywords.  Keywords are the words people type into search engines to find your site.  A good keyword will actually be a phrase, and not a single word.  For example, if you own a piano store in Dallas, a good keyword for you would be “Dallas piano store.”

Once you have a pretty good list going, go to the Google Keyword Tool and put in your keywords.  Here, you can find out how many people are searching for those keywords every month.  (This tool will also generate additional related keywords that you may not have thought of initially.)

Very high traffic keywords (in the tens of thousands) will be difficult to rank for–meaning that you can use these keywords in your site, but when someone types them into Google, your site is not likely to be one of the top search results. On the other hand, the lower the traffic estimate is, the more likely your site will be to show up at the top of the listing when someone types in that keyword.

The problem is, of course, that if no one is searching using your target keywords, it doesn’t matter how well you rank for them.  Your site will still get no traffic.  The trick is to find keywords that sit at a good balance between no search traffic and too much search traffic.

Once you find the right keywords, make sure you use them in your title tags and page headings.  Do not spam the search engines by using them too many times.  If you repeat your keywords too many times per page, Google will ban your site from its listings altogether. Always remember to write your web site content for people, not search engines.

Get high quality links pointing back to your web site

In the old days, you could manipulate your search engine ranking solely by creating a search-engine friendly site and using keywords wisely.   Google thought that gave web masters too many opportunities to game the system, which resulted in irrelevant results.  In an effort to provide good, relevant results, Google changed its search algorithm to take into account the number of other sites that link back to your site.  The more people link to your site, the more it will rise in search engine listings.  To start getting links back to your site:

• register with directories like yellowpages.com, business.com, bestoftheweb.com, etc.
• join local chambers of commerce and get them to link back to you.
• issue press releases via prweb.com and similar services.
• Create “linkbait,” which is a lot of unique content on your site that other people will naturally want to link to.

Creating Linkbait

Sites that naturally rank highly often have a lot of helpful content that people naturally want to link back to.  The more unique content you can write around your keywords, the better.  Never copy and paste articles from other sites, as Google dislikes duplicate content and often won’t index it.  (Also, copying and pasting pictures and text from other web sites is a violation of copyright which can get you sued.)

If you can write articles that will position yourself as an expert in your field, you will be more likely to attract incoming links.  This in turn will push your site to the top of Google’s search engine listings for various keywords, which will hopefully generate business for you.

If you are worried about the ongoing cost of constantly paying someone to update your site with new articles, consider investing in a content management system such as Joomla or Wordpress, which will allow you to write articles and post them yourself.

Be careful building Adwords or other pay-per-click campaigns

If you are having a hard time ranking naturally for your chosen keywords (or if your site is new and hasn’t been indexed yet), you can buy links to your site that show up on the first page of search engine results.  In Google, paid links show up on the right hand side of the screen, whereas organic search results show up on the left.  However, if you’re not careful, you can lose a lot of money fast.

A full-scale Adwords tutorial is beyond the scope of this article, but it’s important to know that choosing the most popular keywords for your Adwords campaign is often the wrong way to go.

For example, if you own a web site hosting company, you might think it  would be a good idea to buy the keyphrase “web site hosting.”  Then, every time someone types “web site hosting” into Google, your ad would show up.  This seems like a good idea until you realize that every time someone types in that keyprhase and clicks on your ad, it will cost you $8-12.  Add that to an estimated traffic volume of 147-184 clicks per day, and you have spent $1200-2100 per day on internet advertising.  If you only make a few dollars off every new web hosting account you sign up, you’ll quickly go out of business this way.

Instead, you want to find longer phrases that are more descriptive and cost less money.  Consider using regional modifiers, such as “Dallas web site hosting” or “Denver web site hosting.”  Other common modifier words include “cheap, affordable, buy,” etc.  Longer phrases are available for cents.  The down side is that long phrases don’t individually generate very much traffic.  The key is to come up with a lot of long search phrases that each generate a little traffic–hundreds of phrases, if possible.  When you group them all together behind one ad, the result is a lot of traffic for cents per click.

These tips should get you started on the road to effectively marketing your business online.  If you have additional questions, feel free to email me at jenn@zensamarketing.com.

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