Why is my Loganville business not showing up?
Companies and clients in the Loganville area often ask me what they can do to improve their presence on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. They also want to know why their website doesn’t work correctly, show up in certain search results, and why no one can find them on Facebook or Google+ for example. some expect e-mails that never arrive, or phone calls that never happen. To understand what needs to be done, we need to understand how the internet works.
How does it work for my business?
Web presence is not just about “having” a website, in the same sense that making money is not just about “having” a business. It’s what you do with the business, how you present it and promote it, your products (content) and their quality (keywords, organization). Marketing campaigns work online like they do in the real world, although often it is cheaper and easier to run online campaigns than print, video, or signage. Businesses don’t last without networking, examination, and changes in the same way websites cannot remain static. That being said, here are 10 things most businesses can do to help their online presence:
1. Submit your business to Google:
Google Places for Business and Google+ are great tools that help you show up in a hurry when someone is searching your area for your product or service. A simple listing, much like what you’d find in the Yellow Pages, is all it takes to show up in Google most of the time. This tactic, of course, becomes mostly irrelevant if there is a massive amount of competition in your area (try searching ‘Atlanta Restaurant’ in Google vs. ‘Loganville CNC shop’) but usually is a great place to start promoting business.
They usually ask for normal business information, such as address, website, hours, phone/fax, email, etc – and then will send you a validation PIN via good ‘ol snail mail. Once your PIN arrives, you enter it in and make your listing go live. Your business, along with service area and all your information, should now appear in relevant results. By ‘relevant’ we mean geographically local or nearby.
2. Make a Facebook Page or update your existing Page
Everyone is one Facebook these days, so why not your business? Facebook is one of the greatest free marketing tools available, if used correctly, and can generate massive amounts of interest in your business. A little creativity and sharing can turn a few likes into hundreds, so make sure your content is worth sharing with others. Many pages post funny or ‘vote-on-this’ pictures and posts that invite users to interact and discuss the content on the Page. May companies, myself included, use Facebook as a platform for sharing new updates and content of the business’s website.
3. Check your website content thoroughly
Often (especially from me and my website) you will hear the term ‘Organic SEO’ thrown around, as if everyone is supposed to know what that means. While I can write pages and pages on SEO and different approaches, let’s focus on the one that most people can at least initiate on their own – Organic.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization (usually) and simply means a process by which a website is examined to see how easy it is for a search engine to read through it, understand the content and relevant keywords / theme, and navigate to different pages and posts. There, not so complicated, right? Well, perhaps a little harder to understand than other topics on web design, so let’s delve a little deeper. Just a little!
Search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing!) do not search the entire internet all at once when you click “Search!” Instead, the people who run the search engine companies have computers that run programs called robots (yes, robots – not real, mechanical robots, but automatic programs) that basically do what you do when surfing the web – open pages, read them, click links, read more, etc. – only they not only read, but dissect pages looking to understand what the page is all about by looking for keywords and titles. For example, my page about web design is titled Web Design, contains many instances of words like “design,” “web,” “internet,” and so on, and is part of a website that has “designs” in the name – so the robots know that this page is about my web design.
The robots send this information to the search engine computers, which store all this in a HUGE database (remember hearing about Google trying to take over the world? This is where those stories came from. Search engines store literally EVERYTHING on the internet). This database is updated second by second, but since the web is so massive, updates to your website typically take a few days to get indexed. When you click “Search” at a search engine page, you are actually searching their index of the internet and its sites, sorted through various complicated mathematical and algorithmic equations into relevantly ranked results.
Why is this important? Because the core of achieving first page presence for your website based on relevant terms is in keywords and organic SEO. If your website does not contain keywords that people use to find products and services like yours – for example “Hamburgers” and “Loganville” – then search engines don’t display you for search results. The more keywords, the better, but only to a point. Too many keywords can actually hurt your rankings, as search engines think you are trying to “spam” yourself by attempting to get first page results without any relevant content (imagine finding a website, based on the search terms above, that only said the words “Hamburger” and “Loganville” over and over again – not very helpful, and actually quite annoying, you think?).
So what do you do? Simple – organically place keywords in relevant, meaningful sentences and paragraphs. A website talking about the different styles of hamburgers offered in several Loganville locations, the local sources of ground beef, the layout of the storefront, the address, and so on is far more likely to garner first page results than a “spammed” website. So check your content, check your keywords, make sure your website is relevant and organized.
4. Make your website easy to navigate
This may seem like a no-brainer, but many Loganville business websites I have worked on had horrendous, if any, navigation. Navigation and menus are the backbone to the website, allowing visitors to easily navigate from page to page and find relevant, meaningful information. If visitors (potential business) get frustrated because they are lost or confused, they are highly unlikely to use your product or service, or even notify you of the difficulty in navigating your website. As such, many people and businesses have gone years without realizing their website is actually driving customers away!
The most important concepts are accessibility and consistency: The menu must contain a link to all important site content (home, about us, product, services, contact) and must be the same on EVERY PAGE. Having a consistent and persistent menu system allows visitors and potential business easy and smooth access to the site, not to mention search engine robots (see above). Make sure the menu is in the same spot, that it is prominent (I always put it in the header section, right next to the logo as most sites do) and that it is easy to read and stands out.
5. Update your website
If you buy a car and don’t ever change the oil, check tire pressure, or clean it, how long do you think it will last? Or get the attention of your neighbor or friends? It won’t for long, to be sure! The same rule applies to a website – you may have paid for a flashy, great looking and organically SEO’d website, but without maintaining and updating it, you’ll soon find yourself dropping from search results, losing customers who are tired of seeing the same old site over and over, and likely losing compatibility as the internet and web browsers advance.
Adding news articles and updates, posting special coupons and discounts, inviting customers to be featured on the home page or in a testimonials section, and changing the content and layout every so often are all great ways to make sure your website not only stays working and up to date, but continues to show up in search results! Part of search result ranking is based on the age of the content, with newer content or pages getting the leg up on older pages with the same relevance. This is where monthly service plans come into play.
6. Hire a maintenance company
Obviously, I’d be your first choice, right?
In all seriousness, no matter who or what you choose, it is absolutely essential to have a company or person maintaining your web presence. This does not mean adding an article to the site, or updating Facebook. This means maintaining every aspect of online presence, from Facebook and Twitter to Google website tools like Analytics and Webmaster Tools, as well as marketing campaigns, website traffic and optimization, keyword density and relevance checks, reviews on sites like Yelp or Yahoo or Google, inbound linking, traffic sources, and more.
Maintenance companies that offer services like <a href=”/services/monthly-maintenance-plans/”>deClaisse Designs</a> are a combinations of IT support and Public Relations, are rolled into one and capable of performing well on a technological and marketing basis. These are often Aces in the sleeve for small businesses that don’t have full time IT staff or support, as they can get all the benefits of such staff without paying a salary amount. Take advantage of these services, they can make or break small businesses or individual ventures.
7. Take pictures of your work and post them
Many people are doing this these days, and it’s a great way to show off your work and products. Adding them to a website is not only easy to do these days and usually part of a maintenance company’s services, but lends an incredible amount of personal touch and credibility to web presence. When was the last time your bought a pair of shoes online without seeing the photo first? Or how often do you go after something on the menu simply because you saw a mouthwatering picture of it?
This type of visual marketing works well, and actually helps visitors find what they are looking for faster than by simply reading descriptions. Having photos of a service or product can instantly translate into meaningful connections in the mind, and takes the strain of filtering through words and titles in an attempt to find relevant information.
8. Become a knowledge base for your clients / customers
Websites that simply offer services and information about a business do well, if maintained and updated regularly. But to really gain trust and referrals, adding another aspect to your website that brings visitors is a simple as posting articles dealing with your specialty (like this one!).
If you can become a relevant and recognized source of trusted and true information about a certain industry, product, theme, or anything else, you will garner not only trust but business relationships. We all want to buy from people who know what the heck they are talking about, so why should that be any different online? Provide useful and relevant information that visitors can use and pass on, that they can share on Facebook and Twitter and discuss with their friends and family. In essence, become the local Wikipedia for your industry.
9. Send e-mail regularly, and respond to inquiries
So very many businesses trip and fall on this one simple practice – email. It is still a preferred method of communication online – see here for a report from 2011 – and can account for a massive percentage of online leads and business.
Create a mailing list or subscription service and encourage former, current, and prospective customers to sign up and receive updates, discounts, coupons, and more in their own inbox. Always include a link back to the website, and perhaps a personalized message for them. Using methods like MailMerge and templates can create thousands of personal, customizable emails.
In the same vein, make sure to respond quickly and knowledgeably to emails received – the worst mistake a business can make is to ignore customers inquiries, concern, complaints, or comments. They took the time to get in touch with you, take the time to let them know it matters!
10. Never assume!
Just because things “seem” to be working, or the website “seems” to be running fine, and assume you are doing everything correctly hardly ever means you actually are! Always get opinions, reviews, and input from others about your online presence – you may be surprised at what they have to say. Be open to new ideas and input, allow changes that you may otherwise shy away from. In this digital age, riding the wave is the only way to stay on top. If you get comfortable and start assuming and guessing, you will not get anywhere. All good business owners known and understand this concept, but it has to be applied to internet presence and marketing the same it is applied everywhere else.
For more information, questions, comments, and so on, send me an email through or contact form or post me on Facebook. Have any ideas for future write-ups, like tutorials, top lists, etc? Let me know!
