O’k you have an ongoing business and would like to have more customers. You feel you could benefit from use of the web. After creating a website and a Facebook page for your business, what do you do next?
First: Find out what your competition is doing on the web. (This should actually have been done before your website was created). Do this by searching for your product or service on the web. If you are the kind of business that only serves a certain geographic area then limit your search to that area for now. Look at the first 10 web sites that come up when you do a search. Use Google since over 60% of searches use Google right now. Compare your web site with those of others who are competing for the same business. How do they look? Are there lots of pictures, prices, web specials or lots of other relevant information for searches to look at? Would you buy from you over your competition?
Second: If you are a business that sells in a certain geographic area make sure you are listed in the three major local search engines.
If you are a seller of products or services that covers the entire United States you will have quite a lot of competition. This may not be a DIY project. You can still look for ideas in the first 10 – 20 websites that come up, however. You can use a free service from www.compete.com to see how much traffic your major competition is getting compared to you and where it is coming from.
Third: Make sure that your website contains the exact phrases people would use in searching for your services. In working with one contracting client we determined that the client was not getting any traffic for the piping services they provided and according to Google ‘piping’ was a relatively heavily searched term. The reason for this was simple, they never had the word ‘piping’ in the website! Searchers for ‘piping’ were never presented with their website because Google’s computer scan of the site never saw that word in the content of the website. (Words in graphics and navigation tabs do not count much)