Think about Search Engine Optimization this way: no matter how good your business is, if you are not getting yourself out on the Internet letting everyone know what you are doing, what your expertise is, how experienced you are, what your products or services are and what makes you the right choice for your prospects- on a regular basis, no one searching online for your products or services will be able to find you.
Many business owners want to get to the point where they are driven by referrals. They want the phone to ring with the best prospects calling from referrals, or at least have the choice of operating this way once they have grown to the level they are comfortable with. Even referral based businesses must have a strong Internet presence, because their referrals “Google” them by name. As long as your site represents you well and is decently designed you should come up at the top of Google by name. Referral based businesses need to remember that more people will see their website than see their see them or their businesses, so they need to try to keep their website up to date and at a level that does not increase the risk of you losing referrals.
I spoke to a business owner who had a customer a few blocks a way that he never met face to face until after a year of doing business with them to the tune of $120,000.
I was at a business a few months ago that said every time the phone rang from a referral that said “I was looking at your website…” they cringed because as good as they were their website looked very “20th century”. They did not want to invest in search engine optimization for advertising purposes, but they needed to be represented online at least as well as they were at their office location and through the words of others who were referring them customers. A business like this can get a fully customized website with RSS feeds, and add flash and video for a total cost of between $3K and $6K-with no need for significant time or money spent on Search Engine Marketing.
If you are like the rest of us and you are not already famous and you need more quality customers, then you need to treat the Internet like another community that you are reaching out to and getting to know so they can get to know you. You need to “take Google out to lunch” and discover what they want from you for you to be considered an authority in your field and recommend you to the people who come to their site looking for a business like yours.
You need to get up to date information about you and your firm online regularly. Taking your referral partners out to lunch once every two years is not going to work as well as taking them out once a month or once a week.
How do you do that? The short answer is through blogs, press releases, forum postings, videos, emails and of course your website or websites.
If networking is not your strong suit, you might consider developing that skill or hiring a PR or sales/marketing specialist to do it for you. If you are not capable of implementing the strategies required to earn Google’s respect and have them begin to refer you business, and you do not want to spend your time learning how to be a website developer and optimization specialist, then you need to hire someone you can trust to do it for you.
How do you find someone to do it for you?
Check out my previous post on choosing someone to do your Internet marketing.
Of course, if you really wanted to be thorough, you could take the time to put together a comprehensive RFP (request for proposal) and ask 2-3 reputable SEO service providers to look at it, put together a proposal and present it to you.
The problem is that you are not likely to be an Internet marketing expert (if you are, that’s still only half the battle). You may not know what is available or what you should even look for in an Internet marketing specialist.
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