Welcome to the February issue of Biz Talk! This publication is a free, subscription-based resource from Five Sparrows, LLC, which specializes in new web site development, web site re-designs, and complete online marketing services for small businesses.

We welcome your questions, comments, or inquiries at editor@fivesparrows.com. Enjoy!

Impressing Google

While it’s true that there are many different strategies that can be used to optimize a web site for search engine success, one of the most overlooked methods for improving search engine placements is building up your web site’s credibility. When you provide your visitors with lots of useful, relevant information on your web site, you create professional credibility and establish your expertise in your industry. When your web site is credible, people will naturally want to link to all of your good information, and your pages will likely be loaded with the keywords and phrases that matter most to your company as well. In other words, a credible web site has many of the elements that impress Google the most!

Brownie Points From Google
One of the ways you can help build your web site’s credibility is to create an online glossary for your site and link to it from the rest of your pages. Think about it – we know that Google gives you points for using your keywords in the text of your links, so why not pick up some extra points by linking your key terms to a glossary that further explains them? This is also extremely helpful to visitors who are on your site to learn about your company, products, and services as well.

Credibility Through Repetition
Let's say, for example, your business sells insurance, and that each type of insurance that you sell has its own web page. Now imagine that some of your important keywords like “auto insurance,” “life insurance,” and “renters insurance” are linked directly to a glossary page that contains these keywords, plus a short description of each. In this example, you’ve used your keywords as links, and repeated the keywords on the glossary page as well as on the product pages. All of this contributes to the credibility of your web site as Google sees it.

Thinking Like a Spider
A glossary page is inherently loaded with specific words and phrases that are relevant to your business. When a search engine “spider” visits your glossary, it sees these words and phrases and also sees that they are cross-linked and used throughout your other web pages as well. So what’s a spider to think? It would probably think that your site is very important, relevant, and credible. And credible web sites can lead to more web site traffic, increased inbound links, and ultimately improve your search engine placements in Google. Now that’s impressive!

Tough Times Call for Smart Marketing

No matter what you call it – economic slow down, one-state recession, troubled economy – you’ve probably noticed that business is a little sluggish for many companies today. No doubt times are tough, especially here in Michigan, and that has prompted lots of small businesses to tighten up their spending and budgets to compensate for the change in revenue. It makes perfect sense, of course, but the challenge for many companies comes when deciding which expenses to cut back on, and by how much.

When business slows down, it’s tempting to cut back on marketing and advertising activities since these are often considered to be non-essential expenses. But if your sales have slowed down, that’s precisely the time when you should turn up the marketing on your business to help bring in new customers and jump start your sales again!

So before you make any drastic cuts to your marketing spending, consider implementing some marketing activities that have a low cost but have a high ROI. Specifically, I’m talking about good ‘ol email marketing!

Ready, Aim, Send
Email marketing is a reliable, proven marketing strategy that’s inexpensive to implement, especially compared with more traditional activities like print ads and direct mail. It is also a more targeted strategy than other conventional methods, enabling you to deliver a specifically focused message directly to the customers and prospects that you want to reach. For instance, if you were to segment your e-mail recipient list into categories, you could then tailor your email message to fit the needs of the recipients in each category. So unlike a print ad that is published for a broad audience, an email campaign can be aimed directly at your target audience.

Tracking Results
Email campaigns are also highly measurable, making it easy to track the effectiveness of each campaign. After sending out an e-campaign, the campaign stats can reveal all sorts of useful information, such as the number of recipients who opened the email, how many emails “bounced” or were not delivered (and why), which links the recipients clicked on, the number of opt-ins/opt-outs, how many times the email was forwarded to a friend, etc. By analyzing this data, you can tell if your message prompted a response (such as clicking on a link or visiting a web site), or if your message was even delivered in the first place!

Weathering the Storm
When times are tough, it pays to be smart about your marketing choices. Cutting back on pricey marketing activities is fine, as long as you don’t give up on your overall marketing goals. Marketing’s purpose is to help generate sales and boost your bottom line, which may be even more important if your revenue has slowed down. To help ride it out, try implementing marketing activities that will get the job done, but will do it for less money – like email marketing.

Attracting Spiders with Fresh Content

Whew. You’ve just finished building a perfect web site for your business, and you’ve invested in having the entire site professionally optimized for the search engines. Time to sit back, relax, and watch those search engine positions climb straight to the top, right? Of course not. Even if your perfect web site manages to break into the top few positions in the search engine rankings, it certainly will not stay there unless you have a plan to update your site and add new content on a regular basis.

Search engines thrive on fresh content, but if your web site content never changes, the search engine spiders will eventually stop visiting your site, assuming that it must not be very important if it’s been left unattended or has gone “stale.” Search engines must provide their users with the latest, most relevant information possible, and one of the ways they determine if a site is a good resource is by looking at how often the web site gets updated or changed.

Unfortunately for many small businesses, it’s just not that easy to keep adding new content all the time. It can be a challenge to constantly come up with new things to add to the site, and the time commitment can seem daunting. But since fresh content is so critical to the success of your web site, it’s usually worth the time and effort it takes to maintain your site - for the sake of your visitors as well as your search engine rankings.

To help make it easier for you to keep your web site fresh and updated, here are some suggestions you can use to create new web site content and keep the search engines coming back:

1. Use a RSS feed on your home page. A RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is simply a “feed” of information (such as news headlines, industry announcements, articles, updates, etc.) that comes from another web site (or blog) and is displayed on your web page. For instance, financial web sites typically display stock market feeds, local web sites often display feeds of the current weather conditions, and library web sites sometimes display feeds of new materials that are available each week. Depending on your type of business, there’s probably a good selection of relevant RSS feeds that your web site visitors would find useful, too. What’s useful to your site, though, is a RSS feed that will provide you with updated, fresh content on a regular basis.

2. Add a Blog. By now, you probably know that blogging has become a big hit with business web sites. Why? Because blogs are a great way to communicate with your customers, add content to your web site, and get attention from the search engines. You don’t have to post daily to your blog, but you should try to add something new each week. Even a couple of paragraphs will help, as long as you are consistent with your posts.

3. Write Press Releases. Sending out a press release every few weeks not only gives you new content to publish on your web site, it also generates additional exposure for your business and creates new inbound links to your site. Press releases are an especially good marketing activity for small businesses, since they provide benefits in multiple areas (such as creating inbound links, building name recognition, generating more traffic, etc.). However, you must make sure your press release adheres to accepted journalistic standards and is newsworthy, not just a thinly veiled sales pitch. If you don't know how to write and send a press release, get a professional to help you.

4. Re-Use Existing Marketing Materials. Remember that new brochure you just had printed? How about the ad you ran last week in a local publication? If you have existing marketing materials that are just sitting around, why not re-use them as new content on your web site? You can use almost any marketing materials that you already have, including coupons, recent articles or publicity, or new product information. If it’s not already on your web site, maybe it should be!

5. Send E-Newsletters. E-Newsletters are a great way to add content to your web site, since the content of each e-newsletter that you send to your email list can also be published as business articles or news items on your web site. E-Newsletters also give you a way to keep in touch with your customers and keep your company’s name and message in front of them, which helps you win mindshare and improve name recognition, too!

Competitive Web Analysis

Biz Talk is a Free Publication of Five Sparrows, LLC

Five Sparrows is a Michigan web site development firm and search engine optimization provider offering a complete line of web site marketing stragegies and services designed especially for small businesses.

Because Five Sparrows specializes in working with small businesses, we understand their specific needs and challenges.  We offer a full range of products and services at a fraction of the cost of what traditional marketing and web site firms charge, all designed to help small businesses get a big-company presence on a small company budget.

Our services include web site development and re-design, online shopping, search engine optimization, e-newsletters, email marketing, search engine reporting & monitoring, and more.

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