Article Contributed by Christian Arno
The growth of the internet has provided a massive marketing opportunity for small businesses, putting new markets and potential customers just a mouse click away. There’s more to fully exploiting this opportunity, however, than simply grabbing a little corner of cyberspace and hoping for the best. You might have the most dynamic, arresting website imaginable but that’s little help if no one can actually find it in the first place.
Get your content right
SEO, or search engine optimization, is all about getting people to your site by boosting your rankings on search engines like Google. There are a number of ways of doing this but there’s also a balance to be struck. Ideally you still want that dynamic, arresting website but you also want it optimized with strong keywords in your headings and fresh, relevant content.
Just as there’s little point having a strong website that no one can find, it’s just as bad to have a high ranking site that provides through-traffic but doesn’t convert visitors into customers. You not only want people to visit your site, you also want them to stay there – strong design and content is the key to that.
Research your keywords
Keywords are the words and phrases that people use to search for things on the internet, so you’ll need to identify what terms people are using to search for products like yours, and then ensure those keywords are worked into your page headings, titles and content.
Hold a brainstorming session to come up with as many keywords that are pertinent to your business as possible, and then begin to whittle them down. Take a look at competitors’ websites and run your possible keywords through Google’s keyword tool to see which are the most popular. Inevitably, the most successful keywords will also be the most over-subscribed, so you’ll want a combination of simple, popular keywords and more specific ‘long tail’ keywords.
‘Office supplies’ would be a ‘short tail’ keyword, while ‘cheap colored toner’ would be a more specific ‘long tail’ keyword. It would almost certainly yield fewer hits but would also be more likely to draw in those web surfers searching for that specific product and may result in a higher conversion rate – the proportion of visitors who actually go on to become customers.
…and research them again
Keyword research is an ongoing process rather than a one-off task. The effectiveness of given keywords can vary tremendously over short periods of time and you have to keep abreast of these changes. If possible you should check your keywords at least every month, running existing ones through keyword tools and considering any new ones. Don’t forget to check your site’s data analytics to see which phrases people are already using to find you.
Build appropriate links
Cultivating links to your site from other credible websites can help in a couple of ways. Firstly, potential customers might actually click on the link and reach your site that way. Perhaps more importantly, most search engine algorithms place a great deal of importance on back links and this will boost your ranking on Google and other search engines.
You can get links by placing guest posts or comments on other sites with content relevant to your own, remembering to include a link to your own site within that post. You could also contact webmasters directly, asking them to link to your site – if you offer other website owners useful content for their own site, in the form of an expert guest blog, for instance, you’ll find they’re often very willing to reciprocate with a link.
You should stay away from ‘link farms’, however. These are groups of websites offering reciprocal links for no other purpose than to boost SEO and Google takes a dim view of the practice.
Consider localization
While English is still acknowledged as the ‘lingua franca’ of the web, it’s the native language of only about a quarter of all web users, according to Internet World Stats. Clearly there’s a huge potential market that will never be reached through a monolingual approach – but multilingual online marketing brings its own particular challenges.
First and foremost, you’ll need to have your content translated – you could use a machine translation widget like Google Translate, but you’ll get much better quality by employing native speaking translators in order to retain the nuances of your content. Investing in a separate top level domain (such as .de for Germany or .ru for Russia) can help boost your rankings on Google’s local search engine and other local competitors, but ultimately this will be a judgement call on whether your business’s crossover potential merits the extra resources involved.
Furthermore, you’ll also need to localise all your other online marketing strategies, including researching your multilingual keywords, link-building with websites in the local internet ecosystem (links from .de websites for your German site, etc).
It’s a hefty undertaking, but the good news is that you can dabble in foreign language websites for minimal financial outlay, and there are businesses that specialize in assisting companies with their multilingual online marketing – and best of all, your potential for increased profits will skyrocket with each new foreign market you enter.
About the author:
Christian Arno is the founder and Managing Director of global language services and localization agency Lingo24. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 120 employees spanning four continents and clients in over sixty countries.
Contact Lingo24 with a translation request mentioning www.getentrepreneurial.com before 30 November 2010 and receive a 10% discount on your first order.
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1 Response to Online marketing tips for small businesses
Drew Hunt
September 7th, 2010 at 10:51 pm
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