Hello! If you’re reading this, its most likely because like me, you’re a small business owner and you want to appear in more search results online, smash it with social media and succeed! Rather than pad this out with endless text on the subject I’m going to keep it short, simple and effective in the hopes it helps everyone. By the time you have finished reading this, hopefully you will be able to make things much stronger for your business.
Website Quick Setup
Your homepage is the most important page on your site, and should have a lot of information on it. Many site builders start off with a big picture at the top, with customers scrolling down for information. It’s much better to get straight into text so people can read information on who you are and what you are selling. This will keep people on your site longer, meaning your site will have less people bouncing off it, which can affect your ranking. I use Google Analytics on all my websites to check how many people are coming to my sites and my client’s sites. This enables me to see what is working for me and what’s failing. Don’t be discouraged if you’re not getting people on the site, you will get more when you work on it.
Make sure your website is secured with an SSL certificate, as it’s a legal requirement in the UK and many other countries. If you have a closed padlock icon in your browser URL, you’re golden!
Your homepage should contain:
- A List of Services, linking to each page on services, or better yet, have all the services on your homepage with information on the service provided. You can link to these with anchors for easier access for customers.
- Information about your company and what you do. Most people have an “About Us” section on their website. Keeping this information on the homepage will help it stand out as having a reasonable amount of text will allow you to be more competitive in search results. If you want to keep the about us page, you should rewrite the text from the original page so it’s not repeated through the site, this will avoid anti-spam procedures on search engines.
- Your company address and a map. Look your business up on Google Maps, click the share function and get a HTML embed code to paste the map into your site.
- A contact form and phone number so people can contact you easily. You should still keep a contact us page as well so people who go to other pages can easily find it.
- Don’t use too many pictures as these will slow the site down, but use one or two to keep people interested.
- A Word Count of 1500 words to 2000 words. These need to contain your business name at least 4 times.
Make sure all your images have alt text, as this will help you appear in search results, and not many people do this.
Blogging and Blog Posts:
Why do you need blogs? It’s simple. You need blogs because ultimately they add more information about your business online. I get most of my customers from blogs. Don’t worry though I’m not selling anything, this one is pure information. Blogs help you show up in search results across the web. There are two types of blog you should focus on. Evergreen Blogs and News Blogs.
Evergreen Blogs
What we call evergreen blogs are blogs that can be used again and again. These are blogs about your company and products and services you sell. You will need around 20 of these blogs to start but more is always advisable. This will give you something you can post. If you sell services, you need one about each service, and if you sell products, then one about each product. Each blog should contain your company name at least twice and mention your local area and how to find you.
- 750+ Words per blog – It’s a lot, and I recommend more to be truly competitive. In a big city, 2500 words per blog will start to decimate your competition but it is a LOT of work. Hard work always pays off though.
- Small info on where you are based. This is best placed at the bottom of the blog. This will help you localise your website.
- A picture for the top of the blog, just to make things look pretty. Pictures are scraped by social media platforms like Facebook and make your blog look prettier when you share them. The first bite is always with the eye.
- Company Name, just to keep things related.
- Use linking in your blogs, so link one blog to another on your website, and link your first company name to your home page. This will make sure that your site is easy to use, which will help with more advanced search engines that value this feature as it makes your site easy to use. Internal linking on your site is really valuable.
Keep a document on your computer with all your blogs so you can share them to social media if you ever run out of things to post. Having worked for over 200 businesses, it’s not always easy to come up with posts, so having a backlog of evergreen content means you’ll never run out of content. I realise it’s a lot of work but it is very worth it.
Local News Blogs
If anything is happening locally, you should blog about them, then post the blog to social media. News blogs don’t need to contain a huge amount of information, and you can comfortably go for 350 to 500 words. These only get shared out once, when you’ve written them. Try to contain the town/city you’re based in, and feel free to link to other places in your site from them. You can also provide links offsite to other news sources.
Ultimately blogs have gotten me more customers than anything else. By blogging regularly across my sites, I keep them fresh and I never run out of content.
Social Media
Facebook is useful for basic advertising. Your focus should be to build an audience of over 1000 people following you on Facebook. If you’re not advertising, only a small percentage of your followers will see your posts online. and you want to be seen by as many people as possible.
When advertising, you should put at least £2.00 per day and focus on Page Likes and Visits unless you are really trying to sell a specific service. Its better to get people seeing your content.
Make sure the advertising area you select is at it’s smallest so you are only reaching local people, and don’t add any specific customers to advertise to, as Facebook may know the likes and dislikes of people but it’s not omnipotent. It’s not worth cutting down the amount of people seeing you to a fraction of what you could achieve otherwise.
Always engage with people who talk to you on your Facebook page. If they leave comments that are positive, respond in kind. For negative or irrelevant comments, you can hide them, then respond to the hidden post. This makes it so that other people don’t see negative impressions of your business.
You will want to post to Facebook around 3 times per week.
I personally hate Instagram but it does benefit local businesses when running ads. Since it’s integration into Facebook, it can be successful for any business which has a lot of visual content – photographs of food for restaurants and pictures of attractive items, or happy staff. These all do well. Try Instagram ads out for two months but if they aren’t working for you, avoid them like the plague afterwards.
Twitter/X
Twitter is an awful platform and personally I’d recommend avoiding it. It works well for big businesses, but for smaller companies, results have always been really poor.
Google Ads
Most people will advertise under their business name, and I absolutely hate Google Ads, as I’ve never found them that useful for small businesses, but they can increase your traffic. My recommendation is to use longer keyword setups that people aren’t looking for to compete “advertising agency” for example is not a good choice” but “I want to advertise in Wivenhoe” would be a good one for a Wivenhoe based marketing company. When playing with Google ads, try a number of keywords and find out what’s working best for you. You’ll want to look at your analytics to see which ads are cheapest and provide the most traffic. Keep your advertising cheap as possible, even if something only gets a few visitors a month, if it costs a few pennies, who cares?
Controlling Social Media
Constant focus on social media can drive anyone nuts. My recommendation is look into a social media toolkit like: Hootsuite or Buffer. Both offer free options to set up your social media for the week so you can get them to post for you and you can forget about it. If you’re like me and want everything automated:
Content Studio is a great paid option that will allow you to set up your social media on a post cycle that you can post forever on, so you never have to worry. I recommend 3 posts per week with a 33 post setup. These can be evergreen posts from your site and posts you can make for your business. Canva has an option where with a free account you can quickly make great looking posts. It’s a godsend, and worth upgrading to the paid version.
Backlinks
Backlinks are made when people link back to your website. They’re invaluable because what we call a “Dofollow” backlink endorses your website and content. If you write an original article of 750+ words so I can post it uniquely online, I will happily post it on one of my many sites and link back to you. If I link to your website, in an article about your work, it helps promote you with the power of my websites supporting yours. I did this with my SSL certificate post earlier, linking to an old post I did on the value of having an SSL certificate.
I am happy to link back to people from my websites if they provide articles. For information on how to do things, I’ll link back from my news and articles website, Sect News. For information about your business, I’ll link back from Near-Me.business. I also have many other websites I can link back from. Anything marketing-related, I can link back from my marketing website, Fantasoft.
On Near-Me.business, I also put up articles on sole traders, like my old friend Dug Stokes who wrote an article for me on what he does as he understands the value of SEO in this way. SEO being the optimisation of websites to appear in search engine results for sites like Google and Bing.
Send your articles to alex@chanwalrus.com and I’ll get them up usually within a few days and shoot you an email to let you know. I also appreciate any links back to my site so if this has been valuable for you please feel free to link to this article. If you don’t have a website, I can make a microsite for your business and host it on this website, as long as you’re not doing E-commerce, email me for more information. I’m also happy to give any advertising advice or help out small businesses for free.
All this information I’ve provided is only basic and there are many more techniques to improve your business online. But it’s always best to start with the easy stuff.
May your business be successful, and highly profitable.