Author: Pamela Swift

Categories
Online Business

How to do SEO for small Businesses

Article Contributed by Amin Ghale

Small businesses SUCK at SEO. There I said it. Yes, it’s a hard term but that’s the reality.

According to the findings of Clutch survey, still 29% of small businesses don’t have websites. And 17% out of the 71% don’t have a responsive website. Yes, the numbers have grown significantly but it doesn’t change the fact that small businesses don’t take online marketing seriously.

The major reason behind it seems to be the lack of technical skills and monetary resources. However, these problems can be easily sought with CMS like WordPress.

Here’s how:

Get a theme for less than $50 and hook up with a hosting server for $3 per month. This is all it takes for a small business. You don’t need a big dedicated server for a small space business.

If you can’t do it find an expert that will do everything in a cheap rate.

So, you have got a website live and running. Now what?

Follow these 4 tips to make sure your small business is off the charts.

Make sure your on page is correct

This is the first and foremost thing you should do after your website is live. On page deals with anything as small as page title to making sure your content has a decent list of LSI keywords.

You should always target your best keyword in homepage. So, if you offer airport taxi service, have the content around that keyword. Sprinkle the variations of the keywords in heading tags and body. It shouldn’t look like you are forcing the keywords into it; rather it should blend with the content. The graphics in the content should have variations of keywords in the shape of alt tags.

The concept isn’t about making it look real; it’s about making it actual “REAL.”

Technical SEO is crucial

Okay, relax now. Before you start scratching your head, hear me out.

Technical SEO isn’t as complicated as you think. Yes, if you need to dive deep, it will take more than just a basic knowledge. But for small business, understanding few terminologies will be enough.

I haven’t come with serious technical SEO issue when I’m working with small businesses. It doesn’t mean it can’t come ever. But the chances are low.

Know how to setup some easy configurations like robots.txt and htaccess. These two elements play a huge part in crawlability and indexibility. So grab a better grip of the two elements.

Focus Local

Have you ever searched for some location based terms like electrician in Sydney? Probably you have. If you have noticed it, you will find that 3 local businesses come up with some ratings and directions, right?

That’s the local SEO.

One big advantage that small businesses have over Ecommerce website or any other websites is the power of local SEO.

Getting ranked in local isn’t a tough ask like organic rankings. Unlike many ranking factors for an organic result, local SEO has limited factors. Elements like proximity level of search, reviews, citations etc can easily help you get ranked locally.

Earn backlinks

This is the most important and fun part of a small business for me. You need to earn backlinks to not only rank organically but also in local results. There is a definite correlation between organic SEO as well as local SEO. So, if you can rank well in organic, there is a huge chance that you will also get ranked in Google local map pack.

So what are the types of links that you can build for small businesses?

Unlike many competitive niches, you don’t need a tonne of high-quality links to get you ranked. Well, it helps if you have it.

But, even with links from directories, web 2.0, citation sources, blog comments, and few quality guest post links can get you ranked in local SEO. Never the less, you should never stop building links for your site.

Engage in social media

Social media like Facebook and twitter can not only hook you up with decent clients, it can also have positive impact on SEO of your business. Although, Google denies that they don’t take social signals as the factors for obvious reasons. But we have seen the data where social links do work at times.

Build a social media foundation and work on it. Every social media isn’t going to work for your business. So, explore the one according to that fits your needs and audience persona.

Closing Down

Doing SEO for small businesses isn’t a tough ask. It’s the lack of knowledge and dedication of small biz owners that results in poor SEO value. Apply the above 5 tips for your business, and you surely will be of course.

Author Bio

Amin Ghale is a Web developer from Sydney and SEO consultant at WP Creative. He loves to play around with codes on WordPress and build strategies to grow his client’s businesses. In free time he hunts down for news on WordPress & entrepreneurships.

Categories
Finance & Capital

Personal Credit vs. Business Credit for Small Business Loans

Many small business owners don’t realize this, but personal credit and business credit are actually two entirely different entities. That being said, in many cases they end up getting mixed due to the fact that many small business owners do not have a clear enough distinction between their personal and business finances.

“What is Personal Credit?”

Essentially personal credit is tied to your Social Security number and is meant to track your creditworthiness based on your personal finances. As such any personal loans, credit cards, and other forms of debt will come under its purview.

Many small business owners take out personal loans to fund their businesses and raise capital, and some also tap into home equity or use personal credit cards for business expenses. As a result the delineation between the personal and business credit is often blurred.

“What is Business Credit?”

In contrast to personal credit, business credit is tied to your Employee Identification Number (EIN) or Tax ID number. Some small business owners may not even have an EIN however, as sole-proprietorships do not require it. However in the absence of one it won’t be possible to establish business credit.

Assuming business credit is established however, it will be scored based on the business debt, how it pays off bills, and any lines of credit that have been extended. Because it deals with a limited range of variables, your personal finances are less likely to affect your business credit and more often than not it works the other way around.

“What Do Small Business Loans Look At?”

Unlike big corporations, small businesses unfortunately rarely have the luxury of relying solely on their business credit. That is due to a variety of factors, but mostly it comes down to the fact that most small businesses do not have a well-established business credit.

As a result of that, more often than not lenders will look to a small business owner’s personal credit score to determine whether or not they are eligible for a loan. In some cases that can compound things further especially if the business has incurred debt in the form of personal loans which is affecting your personal credit rating.

What Needs to Be Done to Secure Small Business Loans

Based on everything you now know, it should be clear that the first thing that you should do is start to establish business credit. The first step to do so is to get an EIN – which is simple enough really. Also it would help to register with business credit bureaus such as Experian and Equifax.

After that you should look to separate your personal and business finances by getting a separate business checking account, using a business credit card (compare credit cards online first), and making sure your personal finances don’t overlap. Once you do you can start to compare small business loans and see which offer the most favorable terms, as any payments to loans will help build your business credit further.

Categories
Entrepreneurship

5 Goals for New Business Owners in 2017

Article Contributed by Dan Razak

While some new business owners are more modest when it comes to their expectations than others, the end goal that they all share is the success of their young company. Some aspire to make their brand as popular as much as Coca-Cola or McDonald’s, and that way, create a legacy that will stand a test of time, while others are merely content with the idea of being their own boss. However, in order to get there, one must first reach some minor milestones along the way. With this in mind, here are five easily reachable goals that every new business owner should set their mind to.

1.      Keep your employees

What makes people fall in love with their workplace? Well, there are several factors. Some are driven by ambition and chances of vertical mobility. Others are motivated by greed. Then, there is a number of people who feel some sort of loyalty towards your brand or their boss. This final part is particularly important since there is a study that shows that people are more likely to quit because of the manager rather than the company. Be that as it may, as your employees start gaining more knowledge and start delivering promising results, your competitors might decide to try and poach them.

2.      Develop a sense of community

An ideal team model in the 21st century puts a heavy emphasis on diversity. Even though this may bring better results, this also means that you are supposed to put people coming from different backgrounds side by side and expect them to just get along. Well, this is actually not impossible, as long as you are there to give them a little push. Try to turn your teams into homogenous communities by exercising teambuilding activities and making interactive meetings where they will be able to share their ideas with each other.

3.      Develop a better tax strategy

In order to keep your business profitable, you need to pay attention to both your income and your expenses. One of the ways you can become more efficient in the latter is by developing a better tax strategy. However, this would require you to have a better understanding of tax structures, which would in turn give you a much more reliable succession planning. The best way to get a grasp of this would be to find a reputable tax accountant in Sydney area and consult them about this issue.

4.      Learn how to say no

One of the biggest mistakes new owners make is believing that saying no to a business offer is a bad practice. While there is some sense to this claim, it is even worse to agree to a project you know you can’t finish in time. This way, you will get a bad reputation and probably be forced to pay some penal fees for failing to follow up on your promise. Sure, it may be difficult, but for the sake of your business you must learn how to say no to your clients. Still, you’ll need to be quite delicate about it. Luckily, there are more than a few good ways to say no to a customer or a business partner.

5.      Diversify

Finally, keep in mind that putting all your hopes in a single product or service seems more like gambling than running a business. This is why, in 2017, you need to try and diversify a bit. Try to make another source of income for your business, even if it means advertising or retailing products made by other companies. Once you manage to secure at least a few streams of revenue, your business will become more independent and you will get into a position from which you can make some riskier moves.

Conclusion

While on their own, each one of these goals may not make that much of a difference, together they can completely revolutionize your business model. Apart from improving your income and making your company’s future more predictable, they are also making your business more flexible. This means that no matter what happens in the future, your business will adapt much easier.

About the Author

Dan Radak is a marketing professional with eleven years of experience. He is a coauthor on several websites and regular contributor to BizzMark Blog. Currently, he is working with a number of companies in the field of digital marketing, closely collaborating with a couple of e-commerce companies.

Categories
Finance & Capital

Why Commercial Customs Brokers Are Good for Your Business

In business, one of the basic principles is that you buy low and sell high – which is why importing goods can be a very lucrative venture. All one needs to do is find a supplier that offers very low prices on consumer items, and you can then sell these items in the US with a nice profit margin.

Although there are potential problems such as obtaining commercial customs clearances, a professional customs broker can always take care of it for you.

What you don’t want to do, however, is to attempt to deal with customs yourself. To avoid risking your goods and minimize complications, you should always choose to get a licensed broker to represent you instead. Hiring professional customs brokers offer several advantages:

  1. It saves you the trouble of doing it yourself. If you’re running a small business, then you have lots of tasks to attend to, and it may seem that there’s not enough time during the day to deal with all of your responsibilities. So, why should you add to your responsibilities, when you could get a pro to do it for you instead? You can then devote your time to the day-to-day running of your business.
  2. It’s faster. Things go a lot faster through customs when you have a broker to represent you, and you can waste a lot of time if you attempt to do it yourself. It’s highly possible that you’ll be tripped up by precise rules, finding yourself with errors that delay the whole process.

Dealing with customs is anything but simple, and it takes a lot of time even just to get a ‘basic’ overview of the entire process. The US Customs and Border Patrol offers this “overview” of the process in the form of a PDF file that spans 211 pages!  Merely reading this report will waste a lot of your time, and it can equally be very difficult to interpret.

Customs brokers, on the other hand, are experienced in these matters, with a wealth of background knowledge to help ensure that you comply with all regulations. That speeds up the entire process considerably.

  1. You avoid penalties. When you’re dealing with customs, mistakes can be costly and you may find yourself having to pay penalties for any errors made. There may also be some taxes and fees forced upon you that you could have avoided if you had the necessary knowledge, imposing a significant extra cost to you as a business owner.

The brokers all possess this necessary knowledge, so mistakes and unnecessary fees can be avoided. This is one reason why getting a customs broker is actually a cost-effective measure, even though you have to pay for their services. You’re much more likely to pay a lot more without them.

  1. You get accurate records. At the end of the process, you’ll be sent the necessary paperwork for your record keeping so that you have the proper documentation for the importation. What’s more, customs brokers normally keep copies of all transactions for at least 5 years after the date of entry, meaning that they’ll act as a reliable backup for any queries that you might come across during your running of the business.

The next time you need commercial customs clearances for your consumer items, do yourself (and your business) a favor, and carefully consider hiring an online customs broker. With the skills and means required to facilitate a trouble-free importation process, their expertise is at your service to ensure a smooth, successful experience with Customs.

Categories
Starting Up

How To Develop a Startup Business and Move It Online

Do you remember what the famous Chinese philosopher Laozi said? “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. We will discuss those steps right below.

Do you have ideas, dreams, ambition but lack a magic dash to take the first step or maybe you just don’t know much about the startups?

Take a deep breath. In fact, starting an online business is not as difficult at you might think. It consists of a series of steps that need to be taken.

Business plan

If you don’t have a business plan, you need the one. Before starting with online business, you first need to decide what type of business you want to enter into. Take into consideration your knowledge of that particular business. Think about the geographic area you would be operating out of and the geographic regions you would be selling to.

Best advice: Stick to something you know or are passionate about.

A business plan gives you more than the holistic view of what you are trying to do, but also puts things into perspective for you. Here are some free and paid resources you can reach out to regarding your business plan:

A thought out business plan will make you aware of the competition, the existing opportunities, the pros and cons of the industry, etc. But what’s really important, it will highlight your unique selling point.

BTW, a business plan also acts as a sales pitch book.

If your financials are correct, you will clearly know about what your expenses will be, and what it will cost you to run this business.

Once you have determined your vertical and niche for your product &/or service, it’s time to pass over to the next step.

Here are some questions to consider:

  • Is your supply line competitive and reliable enough?
  • What is the competition like? How many of your competitors are from your country/worldwide?
  • Will you be able to compete against them and make your way into the first search engine results pages?
  • How many of your competitors are buying ads? What is the average price they are paying per click? Will you be able to compete with them?
  • What is the average selling price?
  • What is your unique selling point (free shipment, extras, discounts, whatever)?
  • Is the product you are going to sell cyclical in nature?
  • Does your market scale horizontally or vertically?
  • Do you need to invest in inventory? If so, how much does that cost?
  • You may also need to look into Affiliate Marketing and Drop Shippers. These two options are great ways to start without having to worry about any sales process. You simply divert the user to the sale mechanism of the company you are representing as an affiliate, then all the rest is usually handled by them. Passive income for lazy-bones. Actually, referral sales are how most of businesses today are doing business on the web.

Online selling model

Internet Marketing Model is pretty much the same for most businesses.

Supposing you have the most attractive website on the Internet, selling the exquisite product or service. Though, if you don’t have any visitors, you will not be seeing sales soon. In other words, very often we concentrate too much on making our website absolutely perfect and ignore the necessity of visitors/traffic to make sales.

To understand traffic, you need to understand your visitors first. They can be divided into destined: visitors who are destined for your website, that is, they are typing the URL or click on a link to come to your website; transit: the visitors who use your website to go to another one; accidental: visitors who did not mean to come to your website.

Now, when you understand your visitor types, it’s time to get to know what sort of traffic types exist.

The four traffic types are:

Organic:

  • comes and builds up naturally
  • usually involves search engines traffic as well
  • comes through relevant linkages
  • is slow to build up
  • Google loves organic traffic as it is well-behaved

Referral:

  • also Organic in nature
  • comes through articles or linkages
  • is usually a derivative of SEO
  • when optimized – search engines are a major driver of traffic

Paid:

  • not Organic at all
  • existence is based directly on your ability to pay
  • is “keyword” specific
  • expensive – but the more sure to instantly generate traffic for your website
  • most preferred / utilized method
  • hinged on your ability to go keyword research

Direct:

  • is Organic in nature
  • word of mouth / offline referral / brand-identity
  • repeat / bookmarked visitors constitute largest segment
  • most internet marketers would not rely on this method alone
  • largest contributor if you have a brand

Domain name

You need a domain name for your online presence. You can opt for a generic domain name, or a unique domain name. Click here to know more about choosing a domain name.

You need to keep in mind that current online stores heavily rely on online optimization and marketing. That is why, choose your words for your domain name carefully. SEO is the matter you will have to consider later on.

Hosting

Once you have a domain name, you would need hosting. There are a variety of web hosting providers you can partner with: HostGator, BlueHost, GoDaddy, Verisign, 1and1, LiquidWeb, iWeb, etc.

Website development

Once you settled the issue with your hosting, you would most likely need to have a website developed. Here you have two options: either design it from scratch or use a ready-made template from a reliable provider, like TemplateMonster.com. The latter option is simpler, faster, and most cost-efficient, but of course it’s up to you to decide which way to go.

Shipping

If you are selling physical goods, it would be a good idea to sign up with say USPS, Fedex, UPS, etc.

Now, when you are almost done with your store, you would need to take care of a couple of things:

  • Telephone Number and Address for your business
  • Be aware of what your tax rate is if you are shipping within the state
  • Your terms of sale, terms of service, acceptable usage policy, privacy policy, service level agreement, disclaimer and legal terms all need to be worked out by an attorney. Believe us, money spent on this is worth it.
  • Your refund policy and exchange policy needs to be clearly spelled out.
  • Do make sure your shopping cart can handle refunds, etc.

Bookkeeping

For your accounting and bookkeeping, you can resort to a trustworthy online solution like Xero.com or Quickbooks.com.

Customer support

You would also need some form of a Customer Support/Help Desk, where your users can open support tickets or ask questions, etc. There are lots of SaaS options like Home, Web-based collaboration apps for small business, etc. for the purpose. Surf Google for “help desk” or “hosted crm” and you should see quite a number of results.

That’s it. With the above your online store is essentially complete.

Website traffic

We have already mentioned that now you need to draw visitors. The more targeted visitors you have the higher is the probability of a sale.

Most of the online websites fail because they underestimated the importance of post-website construction phase, known as traffic building. No traffic – no sales. Whether you bring in targeted traffic slowly (organically) or via paid clicks, this is an area you cannot ignore.

You can cooperate with a professional (solopreneur or company) to start online campaign for you. The online campaign is not just for marketing purposes, but it is also geared towards your search engine optimization (SEO). You would be looking at things like acquiring back links, having articles written and placed on various ezine sites, listing your website with the necessary online directories, making sure your site is indexed properly by Google and other search engines. Make sure your on-page SEO is done correctly. Your META tags and descriptions are well written, etc.

You can also get started with a small online PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign on Google, to buy ads and bring targeted traffic to your website. PPC is one of the fastest ways to bring visitors to your online store.

Every day nearly 50 000 blogs/websites go online. Think about it. What is going to make your website stand out is only how effectively people are able to search for the things they want to buy and how effectively you utilize and conquer the Search Engine Results Page (or SERPs). Don’t ignore the social media either. Today, more and more users can be found spending endless hours on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. Learn to adapt your marketing and communication by using social media.

In the end, it boils down to two things:

  • The end price the user will pay to have the product/service delivered to them.
  • The user experience.

It is not easy to compete with web giants, like Amazon or Ebay. That’s the truth. You need to give users a reason to come to your website and make a purchase.

Hopefully, this article would give you a clue on how to get started with your online store. We wish you best of luck with your venture!