Search Engine Journal reports that more than 70 percent of online consumers start searching for a product through search engines. As a small business driving sales, you need to employ a strategy to show up in these search results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can generate thousands of sales leads for your business at no monetary cost. When properly used, it increases your organic search ranking so that you are found by a larger number of prospective customers. It also levels the playing field as you compete with larger corporations spending gobs of money on advertising to attract the same customer. Click thrus on organic search results are at least eight times higher than a pay-per-click (PPC) ad. So, here are six simple steps to help you start optimizing your small business website for SEO:

Step 1: Select Your Keywords Carefully

Search for keywords that are relevant to your business. Your keywords should depict the image of your products or services. You can go for ideal or exact keywords for your small business products, but keep in mind they can be more difficult to rank high for due to increased competition. A good idea is to go for keywords or phrases (also referred to as “longtail” terms) that are unique and highly targeted, but generate less competition and volume. The more longtail terms your can quickly rank high for, the more volume of qualified traffic you’ll generate from those collective terms.

Step 2: Optimize Your Content

Regularly optimize the content of your website by focusing on these four basic principles:

• Onsite optimization
• Social media
• Local search
• Link building

Make sure you have the ability to modify content on your website directly. This will allow you to add content focused around the keywords your are targeting to attract new visitors to your website organically. Also, add your primary and secondary keywords for your small business on the homepage title and meta tags.

Step 3: Generate Inbound Links

By asking other trusted websites to feature the information of your business or just by writing great content that others want to refer to, you can increase the ranking of your business. You can also enlist your business in paid and unpaid directories to earn inbound links. But, ensure the sites you are creating linking relationships with are highly relevant to your website. Also, refrain from engaging in blackhat SEO practices such as “paying” for links on other websites. This is frowned upon by Google and can cause your website to be blacklisted and not appear in any search results.

Step 4: Mark Your Presence on Local Sites Too

Small businesses can take advantage of sites who display lists of small businesses for free. Get yourself registered at sites such as Google, Yahoo and Bing local sites. Many of these listings include a location map of your business along with contact and product information. These type of listings help you get in front of local users searching for similar products as yours.

Step 5: Get Active on Social Media

A good way to increase SEO for your business is to interact on social media. Engage directly with customers through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. Search engines like high ranking content on social media platforms, so get active and get found. Social media can be fun, but also very strategic to your business when used with a purpose.

Step 6: Evaluate Your Ranking

The most important step is to evaluate your SEO strategy by measuring your search engine results pages (SERPs). Measure ranking, resulting traffic, and conversion to leads. You may discover that a certain keyword may be popular in driving volume but not conversion. If so, it’s better for you to focus your efforts on driving less overall traffic, but more from high conversion keywords.

You’ve seen them—the strange, square, scrabbled barcodes. These marketing tools are slowly making their way into royalty – Facebook and Twitter – and are not expected to go anywhere, anytime soon. These boxes are known as Quick Response (QR) Codes.

QR codes have been used in Japan for many years in a variety of forms and designs. These codes can be placed anywhere and in any size including the side of a building, the back of a bus, or simply on your website, and work in conjunction with smart phones. Anyone who wants to download the application, sometimes called the barcode scanner app, can then hold their smart phone up to one of the QR codes and take a picture. The application will then scan the picture and link you over to a landing page. For example, if you see a printed poster promoting an upcoming concert with a QR code on it, you could take a picture of the code and it will send you directly to the website where you can buy tickets. Or, if you see a product you are interested in with a QR code, take a picture of it to get more information instantly through your smartphone. Some authors are even getting creative with QR codes and including them within thd body text of novels. For example, the author writes about its main character wandering through the streets of Venice. He accompanies it with a QR code that, when scanned, takes the reader (through their smartphone) over to an actual video of the streets of Venice. But more often than not, QR codes are being used for advertising in offline print media like street posters, newspaper ads, bus shelters, and restroom ads where people are most likely to find the impulse to scan and receive. While this may all sound more like a fad, consider these five reasons why your small business should consider using QR codes in its marketing:

1. Mobility, Mobility, Mobility

People are incredibly mobile today. They are also impatient and constantly rushing. QR codes let people quickly scan something that peaks their interest, and later consume it in detail. It’s unlikely you’ll find many people stopping to write down a website address or phone number from an advertisement they see in public.

2. Integrate in All Your Marketing Touch Points

Have your QR code appear in multiple touch points – Facebook, website, print media, tradeshow materials, and swag – and integrate them so that they deliver the user to a landing page with a consistent message, incentive or offer. Or use different QR codes for each medium and track visitors to discover which is most effective for this type of marketing.

3. Majority Use Smart Phones

QR codes require the use of a smart phone. Studies suggest that about 70 percent of people actively use their smart phones on a daily basis. QR codes gives people one more unique and interesting way to engage with their smart phones.

4. It’s Free

There are many QR code generators to choose from, and most are free. Do a search on Google, and download an app.

5. You Can Brand Your QR Code

QR codes are also getting more sophisticated. And artsy. There are now QR code generators that can incorporate your logo into the actual code design to better align it with your branding and for customer recall.

Guest Author – Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to inbound call center. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including telephone answering services to small businesses and entrepreneurs at Resource Nation.

 

Local media research firm BIA/Kelsey’s most recent Local Commerce Monitor study showed a major jump in the average number of different media used by small and medium-sized businesses for local advertising and promotion—from 3.1 in 2009 to 4.6 in 2010—driven in large part by digital media.

Digging deeper into the LCM data, the marketing behaviors of newer businesses and younger business owners is strikingly different from more well established and older business owners. BIA/Kelsey says younger businesses are a leading indicator of where the SMB media and marketing world is headed – more digital, more engagement, more use of digital tools and cloud-based applications.

Within this in mind, BIA/Kelsey is hosting a conference next month focused on the latest tools and technologies for small business marketing. DMS ’11: The Summit for Small Business Advertising Solutions, which takes placed Sept. 20-22, in Denver, will bring together top executives from companies like AT&T Advertising Solutions, Facebook, Infogroup, MerchantCircle, Microsoft, Urbanspoon and Yellowbook, to break down the components of modern SMB marketing and analyze where the biggest opportunities are for players in the local-social-mobile ecosystem.

Exclusive Offer for BIG Marketing Readers
As a sponsor of DMS’ 11, BIG Marketing for Small Business readers and subscribers can receive a $200 discount on the cost of conference registration when signing up with promo code DMS11BIG. More information is available on the conference website at http://www.biakelsey.com/DMS2011.

It’s difficult not to succumb to the allure of that picture in your head of instant success, raving fans and high returns when launching your small business. Yet for most, success is elusive and requires time, patience, resilience, and often several failures before being achieved. One way to accelerate your path to success is by adopting an aggressive web marketing strategy.

An integrated web marketing strategy is a fundamental building block for small businesses. The reason is simple. The masses are making online and offline purchasing decisions by investigating on the web. Crowd sourcing websites like Tripadvisor and Yelp carry heavy influence because they allow the general public to rate and review services. Online users trust these reviews, more so than “professional” critics. They also trust the organic search results in Google, mainly the top five listings that show up at the top of page 1. And they pay very close attention to what their friends are liking or commenting about on Facebook. Whether you like it or not, you need to be in these places to grow your small business. You can start by focusing your web marketing efforts and resources through these three activities:

• Blogging to inform, educate and share in a personable, authentic manner
• Social Media to connect and cultivate a community
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to show up at the top of search results

Blogging

A blog attracts potential customers to your website only if what you write about is worth reading – that’s the key. If you are simply using it to sell or promote your wares, then don’t bother wasting your time blogging because nobody cares. Online users are savvy and prone to clicking away. They are far more likely to stop to read an article that helps them improve their health or run their business better, rather then a promotion for vitamins or consulting services. When blogging, you need to give knowledge to earn engagement. And if you do this well and consistently, you will build an audience that will talk about you to others. A blog should also serve as the “hub” of your social marketing, using Twitter, Facebook and other forums to push the content out from your blog, and to drive traffic back to it.

Social Media

Like blogging, social media is only as good as the knowledge you share. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are powerful mediums for finding and connecting with like-minded people who share the same passions and interests. But just like inviting a group of friends over for an informal dinner, only to use the gathering to sell them on some multi-level marketing household goods, using social media to self-promote is a giant turn off. Treat your fans and followers as friends. Engage, share, learn, and inform. If your passion is cooking and you run a restaurant, post some of your recipes to your Facebook page (while encouraging fans to do the same); tweet out innovative cooking techniques you find online; write reviews of restaurants or cooking books on your blog; and always invite comments, ideas and feedback from your audience. Social media is a conversation, not a pitch.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A recent study by Slingshot SEO showed that the click-through rate for a website in the number 1 organic spot on Google is 18 percent, with second position at 10 percent, third at 7 percent, and so on. The number 1 spot gets more clicks than 2 and 3 combined! That’s really hard to ignore, so don’t. SEO is very important to a successful online marketing strategy. So how do you start? There are SEO best practices you can implement yourself, some of which you can find on this blog as a starting point. Over time, however, it’s worthwhile to outsource this ongoing activity to an SEO expert who can stay up on the changes to Google’s ranking algorithm.

Here’s something very geeky.

A new infographic from PEER 1 Hosting that illustrates the 70 year history of the Supercomputer. The first Supercomputer was launched back in the 1940s and used electronically operated switches, vacuum tubes, and analog machine movements. Today, the fastest Supercomputer – the K Computer out of Kobe, Japan – boasts 8.2 petaflops of processing power! The next fastest is the Tianhe-1A out of China at 2.6 petaflops. And between 2025 and 2045, Supercomputers are expected to develop self awareness. Creepy.

Created by PEER 1 Cloud Hosting

Do not be afraid of big search engines if you are a small business.  Any good business owner or manager knows that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a key contributor to the success of a business. While the potential to advertise online is huge, local marketing is the perfect place to start and is ideal for small companies looking to target individuals in a specific area. Chances are, your potential customers will want to engage with your business in-person. So, taking advantage of local searches is key – you need to be sure that your company can be searched for by people in your area.

According to 815imedia.com, “31 percent of all business buyers first use a search engine when looking for something local, and 90 percent of purchases are made within 50 miles of a person’s home.” To make sure that your company is not missing out on these large amounts of customers, there are several local mediums you can use when trying to “get local” with your marketing:

Google AdWords
This is obvious choice for most businesses when it comes to marketing their company because this is where most prospects begin their research into the product or service you offer. Setting up a local Google AdWords program  takes just a few easy steps:

1. Go to the Google home page and click on “Advertising Programs”
2. Click on AdWords
3. Create a Google Account
4. Go to “How it Works” and click on “For Local Businesses”

Other Search Engines
Google is not the only search engine around. Consider Bing. Although it doesn’t carry nearly the same search volume as Google, it’s less expensive for advertising. And while local search engines, such as CitySearch are not as popular, you can usually get your company to show up at the top faster through your SEO efforts.

City or Town Websites
Just about every city and town has a website. The easiest way to get involved is to call or email the editor of the website and ask to place a text or banner ad, or a short description of your company on the website or newsletter. Normally, the website will have a contact link that will send you to the right place.

City or Town Media
Reach out to a local community newspapers and give them a reason to cover you. This is where a good public relations strategy comes into play. Local publications like to focus on local people and businesses in the community. If you’re a nutritionist, why not position yourself as the local expert in nutrition? You can do this by offering to write informative and helpful articles on the subject matter without trying to pitch your business. If the publication chooses to carry your articles, they will give you a byline where you can point readers to your website address or blog where they can find more helpful advice. This strategy serves two purposes: creates trust in your brand amongst readers and drives additional traffic to your website. The additional traffic can also positively impact your search rankings.

Guest Author – Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to document scanning. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including document software to small businesses and entrepreneurs at Resource Nation.

My team at PEER 1 Hosting obsesses over how to accurately track all of our sales leads back to it’s original source, and have that data automatically populated in our CRM system Salesforce.com. Sources meaning Pay-per-click (PPC), banner ads, organic keywords (SEO), live chat, and phone call. As a marketer, you know how invaluable this data is for optimizing your efforts and spend. And as a web programmer or analyst, you know how difficult this is to accomplish.

Enter in Ramon Vawda, my developer guru. He’s uncovered an 8 step methodology to setting up and tracking keywords back to multiple sources in Salesforce. Ryan Kelly covered this in detail in an article on Unbounce. He writes:

The holy grail for most marketers I talk to is being able to track a lead – or even a sale – all the way back to the original source keyword. If the marketer knew that, he or she could easily begin to understand what to focus on in terms of keyword targets for organic or paid search.

Are you running a bloated PPC campaign with dozens of ad groups, and hundreds or even thousands of keywords, not knowing which keyword drove the conversion, lead, or months later, the sale?

Are you using and paying for Salesforce, but have not taken the time to properly pipe in your AdWords or Google Analytics data?

Sounds like a no-brainer, but trust me – there are lots of companies out there with revenues in the tens of millions, or hundreds of millions, who are not doing this right.

Their PPC budgets are way into the six figures per month, and the license fees for Salesforce could probably pay for two or three employees in my company.

The article gets into some detail, but trust me, it’s worth knowing or passing on to your web developer.