SMB’s and SEO Basics - Content Truly is King

I have pretty much worn out my cry of ‘SMB’s are under served’ in the search marketing world. I have said it enough times that there is no special attention given to the company that may want to ‘go it alone’ regarding search engine optimization (SEO), paid search (PPC), blogging and other social media. I think the best way to handle this is to give the SMB all the information they need. What I am going to do over the next few weeks is touch on each of the areas that my SEO audit tool, SEMCheck, hits and why it is important to the search marketing health of any website. Today it’s about content.

Content will always rule for the simple reason that it is the true information that searchers seek thus there can never be enough and what exists can always be improved upon. Many small businesses have sites that are woefully short on content that will satisfy the search engine’s requirements. SEMCheck uses a simple cut off of 350 characters of readable text on the home page as a bare minimum. When I say bare I mean bare. You really need more than that. The first paragraph of this post was about 451 characters alone!

So how do you get that great content on your site? Here’s a few quick tips.

1. Mine the information that you already have in print. Many traditional companies have plenty of material about their industry and their offerings that simply were never digitized and put on the web. Take what you already have an incorporate it INTELLIGENTLY into your existing site.
2. Do a redesign of your site. Many SMB sites are vintage 2000 and it represents the company in a terrible light. Take advantage of the downturn and reposition yourself online t look like you exist in the current market. As you do this, write new copy and incorporate your existing materials into your great new design.
3. Start a blog. If your industry lends to it and you have the human capital to pull it off start writing to your existing clients and prospects via a blog that is part of your corporate site structure. This is the most efficient way to update content on your site by far but it is a can of worms that requires a lot of thought before you crack it open
4. Think big. Try to step outside of what you have traditionally seen your company information as being. Do the research to look at your company from the outside in. This means you have to take the blinders off and take the risk of actually seeing your company the way the market does and not how you THINK it does.
5. Look at your competition. Are you getting stomped in the engines by a competitor? THEN FIGURE OUT WHAT THEY ARE DOING AND START DOING IT YOURSELF!

There’s more. Believe me there is a lot more. The thing you need to know is that when you have a living breathing web site that presents itself to the world as if you really give a crap about how you look and what you say then the search engines will reward you.  It’s more simple than you think. So don’t think about it; do it.

SMB Takeaway: If you are faltering in the search engines and your site has limited, old or just plain bad content then you need to do something. You can whine all you want about not having rankings but they don’t happen magically AND they require real effort on your part.

Thanks and have a great day!