If you own a small business, a family or micro business, today's economy is hitting you hard.
You know yourself that the Yellow Pages and print advertising are very expensive and you get diminishing results as each month passes.
Some are already practically useless.
You still need to advertise your small business.
But the advertising dynamic has shifted and most small business owners do not understand how to develop this new dynamic.
Today, when people need a product they are most likely to search online, and they do their comparison shopping at the same time.
When they get in their car to come to your place of business after their shopping is done, they most likely have made their mind up to buy.
This is different than it used to be.
Gone are the days where your message had to be everywhere, so that if someone were interested in a particular product, they would know you provide it.
With the Internet, you put your message out there, and the people who are actually looking for what you are offering will hunt you down to get it.
We call this "targeted traffic", and if your web site "targets" the words that someone uses in a web search, your web site will be shown somewhere in the results.
When you get high enough in the results, you will be exposed to new prospects every day.
It is then up to you turn them into customers, but remember that every one is predisposed to buy when they contact you.
This brings us to another big problem with this "newfangled" way of advertising.
Suppose you had a perfect two page color brochure about your business or product, one that was perfect in every respect.
One that presented your products in such a manner that it even converted 100% of the prospective customers who looked at it.
If you took this perfect piece of print media, and turned it into a web site, it would be a terrible website.
It might look gorgeous, and every one who sees it might think it was wonderful, but if a search engine were to look at this perfect piece of advertising it would not know what to make of the site.
Search engines need data to make a decision, and listing all your services on a page, contact information, and business information once, no matter how pretty the page, does not help the search engine figure out what the page is about.
It will assign the same importance to every single word on the page, and come to no conclusion.
Search engines cannot read the page title like a human can.
They cannot tell if an image is of a horse or a mountain.
It has to be told that this is a page title, or what the image contains, then it will assign a certain importance to these words because they appear in a title, or image, or a heading, or bold, or any number of things it considers.
It will assign whatever importance its algorithm requires in each case.
It will apply all of its rules and it will come to a conclusion as to what the page is about.
If your page is optimized this conclusion will be correct, if your page is not optimized, this conclusion will be wrong.
If this conclusion is wrong, you will get "un-targeted" visitors.
These visitors will cone to your web site looking for the service or product that the search engine thinks your site is about, instead of what it is actually about.
They will not be looking for YOUR product.
These visitors will not convert to customers for the most part.
It is critical that you understand this next section: When a person is looking online for a product or service, the search engine will try to match the keyword phrase they use in their search query with pages it has decided that have the same important keywords.
The more of these important words you have on your page, within acceptable limits, that match the search query, the more likely your page will appear in the search results.
Over do it, and you get penalized for keyword stuffing, and your site gets dropped far down the rankings if not banned.
Of equal importance, the more words a searcher actually uses in the search query, the more likely a potential customer ready to buy.
Consider these queries: Black and Decker Black and Decker parts center Black and Decker parts center Houston, TX In the first case, this customer is most likely looking for information about something to do with Black and Decker, and may well be considering a purchase, but at this point they are shopping.
In the second case they are looking for something more specific, and they now are very likely to be considering a purchase.
They may well stop shopping, decide to purchase online and wait for delivery of the part.
However, in the third case, this customer is MUCH more likely to be looking for a part very soon, probably now.
Why make this specific query if not to call or go there? In this 3rd case, if you were this vendor and your web site targeted the phrase "Black and Decker parts Houston" you would most likely make a sale.
If your site targeted "Authorized Black and Decker Service" (because you want people to know this) instead, your site probably would not come up for this customer to consider.
The computer cannot make the connection that an authorized dealer would have parts in the way that a human would.
WARNING: This next statement is the single most important statement in this article.
If you want to bring in local customers to a brick and mortar establishment with a web site, you MUST find out what keyword phrases people are actually typing into the search boxes when they are looking for your product or service, and your web site must target these particular keyword phrases.
Shorter keyword phrases bring in more visitors, but less targeted visitors.
Longer keyword phrases bring much less traffic, but this traffic is much more likely to convert to customers.
Now go back and read that again, it is that important.
What this means to the business owner is that whoever builds your web site must build Search Engine Optimization into the site so that the search engines knows exactly what the site is about.
In order to do this you must do the proper keyword research, or pay someone to do it for you.
This is where many small business owners make their big mistake They decide that their business needs a web site, but in order to save money they decide to open a hosting account and build their site themselves.
They use the free web page maker software and build (hopefully, but not likely) a beautiful web site.
One that has all the qualities of their most perfect advertising.
One that has the perfect graphics, lists their services, has wonderful pictures of their products, and has all the contact information a customer will need to contact them.
In fact they could print it out and have the perfect printed brochure and it might even convert at 100%.
But they get no traffic and decide the web is a waste of time and effort.
You see, they know about as much about building and marketing a successful web site as a webmaster does about running a Black and Decker parts supply.
In summary, if you are going to have a web site built for your small business, and you want it to bring in customers, you will have to do proper keyword research and SEO, or pay someone to do it for you.
If you are going to skip these steps, you might as well renew that Yellow Pages ad instead, it will bring you more customers.