Become an expert. Satisfy your target audience.
That simple.
Or do we make it complicated?
There are many distractions (like Google’s new Hummingbird algorithm) and the uphill battle to reside on the first page of Google … a lifelong obsession.
I should know. It is THE FIRST how-to question clients pose.
As a small business owner with limited time and budget, where do you start?
Start with A Plan:
1) Define your audience. Who are they? Why do they need your services? What’s their problem they are trying to solve? And why? When they call you on the phone, what are their primary questions and concerns? Spend some time on this. Get to know your ideal customer inside and out. It’s critical for the steps that follow.
2) Build your niched keyword phrases list, based on the answers to the above audience interests and location for a local business.
Say you’re a local General Dentist with cosmetic flare and an older clientele. Your all-important Title needs to start with benefit keywords, probably end with location keywords – example: “Implant Dentistry, Veneers, 24/7 Emergency Care, Aesthetic Dentistry of Jupiter
3) Create a professional WordPress website/blog that serves as the content engine for all of your social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter etc.
4) Establish your expertise and brand by creating top-notch blog articles and other content. Such as …
- Testimonials from your bigger, more reputable customers who have brand recognition.
- How-to articles based on listening to your customers. What do they ask about in their support requests? If there’s a common question that you can answer with a how-to, then that’s what you’ll write about.
- Guest blog posts from other local business owners in a complementary industry. Make the pitch about them and how it will benefit their business.
5) Isolate the social platforms best suited to your business. They are free, time-eating monsters so you must concentrate on the important ones for YOU.
- Facebook is conversational and ideal if you want to interact directly with customers.
- Pinterest is a visual platform only and a great traffic generator.
- Twitter in its own twitterverse has endless possibilities – the perfect mobile tool, great for researching your industry and competition; today’s PR release uniquely suited to last minute, 140-character shoutouts/tweets.
- LinkedIn, your online resume, is a necessity for all serious business people.
- Google+ spans all businesses and is the automatic method to penetrate the enormous world of Google Search across all its platforms.
WHOA, this is a lot of work. How am I going to do this?
Answer: Think Quality and Consistency.
You will focus on creating high quality content only that will build your authority and reputation with your online community. You will do this within your own time frame (say as few as two blog posts per month) on a CONSISTENT basis.
Tenacity is not the same as persistence. Persistence is doing something again and again until it works. It sounds like ‘pestering’ for a reason. Tenacity is using new data to make new decisions to find new pathways to find new ways to achieve a goal when the old ways didn’t work. Telemarketers are persistent, Nike is tenacious.” – Seth Godin
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia, Genesis WordPress Web Designer, at 561.906.3436.
Follow @jmgroupdesign