When it comes to Main Street, finding a strip mall without two or three “For Rent” signs along it, is a rare occasion lately.   Sure, the sour economy has taken its toll on everyone from the local mom and pop shop to the Fortune 500s.  We know that unregulated big business brought down Wall Street.  But what broke the backbone of the US small business market? Why are small businesses everywhere continuing to fail?

I started to think about this after passing my town’s local pizza joint that recently became one of the many, “here today gone tomorrows” of our time.  Nonni’s had just revamped itself in hopes of generating more business - new flat screen TVs, a decorative paint job that put you right in the middle of southern Italy while indulging in your pie, and some fancy new furniture.  Unfortunately, the owner invested too much of his time and money in the wrong place.

Unless your over the age of 65 or just plain behind, you don’t use paper publications like the Yellow Pages to find what your looking for today.  Instead, we Google, Yahoo and Bing.  We use search engines that give us exactly what we are looking for (and more) in just seconds.  The problem, for many small businesses lining the sidewalks of Main Street, is that their products and services are not being captured by these search engines.  It’s surprising to see how businesses, from general stores to hair salons, don’t have websites (their most important store front and tool for moving up on the search engine ranks).

I understand they are called “small businesses” for a reason.  Localized, smaller centers of commerce and capitalism - plain and simple.  But today, thanks to technology and globalization, there’s really no such thing as being localized, especially if you want people to know you exist.  Bottom line, the small businesses who have remained too small (i.e., no websites or other forms of online advertising) well their time to get up to speed with the rest of the world has come.  Whether your a one man accounting firm or a 30 person nail salon - you need to advertise your services on the web.  The old pen and paper way of managing and publicizing your trade is out.

Let’s revisit poor Nonni’s to try and zone in on how this establishment could have potentially survived the technology tsunami and the recession.

1. If Nonni’s would have invested the $1,000 to $2,000 that originally went to flat screen TVs on a new website, they would have been able to establish a web presence, making it easier for customers to search for their services, order online and look up the shop’s phone number, address, menu, etc.

2. Having a website Nonni’s could have also hired or performed SEO on their website to help increase traffic to their site and essentially generate more business.

3. After getting more business/ revenue from their website, Nonni’s then could have gauged whether or not to invest in TVs and a new paint job based on whether their clients were coming in for pizza or ordering out.

4. After expanding and hiring a larger staff to deal with increased business, Nonni’s could have had a CRM or Customer Relationship Management designed to help more efficiently run their business.  CRM systems could be used to keep better track of inventory, staffing and employment needs like hours and payroll, as well as manage a client and customer list of emails and other contact info to email blast their customers about promotions, new events at the store, etc.

Lesson of the day: small businesses need to focus on their digital store front in order to keep their actual store front up and running in today’s day, age and economic times.

What is pay per click? When you go to google and type in “web design westchester” you see the top sites come up in the white. The two sites on the top and the website ads on the right is what pay per click is. Those people actually pay to get their website in those areas.

Is pay per click worth it? Most of the time you lose money before you actually make money. The reason is because you have to experiment which keywords, ad copy, and bid to place that will give you the most customers. When I say customers I mean people who are going to purchase your products or services, not prospects (people who are just looking). I normally tell people to try it out and keep track of how many people are turning into clients. You can run daily, weekly, or monthly analysis using Google Analytics.

What keywords do I use? When you are searching for the right key words to use for pay per click it is important not to go straight to the “good deal”. Why? Because a lot of the times those keywords are cheap because they don’t hold as much value as other more expensive keywords. A lot of times I look at competition and what they are putting on their ads (it’s not cheating!)

Is pay per click important? I think the people who use pay per click for the easy key words, such as web design Westchester, is wasting their money and time. It takes a little bit of work to get to the front page, however it can be done. If you cannot do it yourself spend the few hundreds of dollars and have a professional do it (like me). I think it’s worth it to spend the money on an SEO specialist to get you to the top, but then again there are negatives. It is up in the air if it will save you money, however think about this how often do you read or even bother to look at those ads? I know my answer is that I never do! Sometimes I’ll click on my competitor’s ads just to click it and make them spend the dollar (I know it’s cruel)! But anyway that’s about all the interaction I have with that portion of Google. Besides you are paying anywhere from 20 cents to 5 dollars (depends on the keyword and how many people want it) to get seen! Well let’s just do an average of 2 dollars… Are you telling me that you are going to spend 200 dollars for every 100 people that come to your website? I guess it really depends how many of those people turn into customers. But the point is SEO really isn’t that difficult once you get the hang of it, it’s just a lot of work because there are so many people trying to get to the front page along with you. However, if you can get to the front page I recommend that instead of PPC and that’s my final answer!

          It’s not an easy task to determine which keywords to use while doing your SEO (also known as Search Engine Optimization) for your website. Unless you are highly familiar with the concept and dynamics of SEO, choosing a few simple words, well . . . it isn’t that simple.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with SEO in general – I’ll make it easy for you.  Go to Google.  Type in something you want to find or learn about in their search engine.  The first entries that come up and the reason as to why they came up in the order they did, is all due in part to SEO.  

         In recent articles, I’ve gone over what to use, how to increase your ranking, etc. But I never really went over how to choose your key words which is the most important part! When choosing my key words for SEO – first and foremost, I do a test run.  I will run a sample search in google and see what results I get for a specific phrase – I specifically look to see how many sites or pages come up with that EXACT keyword. For instance, “web design Westchester ny” has those key words in every link until about the 20th or 21st page. That means that it’s a pretty popular SEO key word search. From this, I can conclude that it will be a little more difficult to get on the first page since my search resulted in quite a few pages that I’d have to beat out. IMPORTANT: This does NOT mean that this is a popular keyword that people are searching with, instead it is what companies or websites are using as their keywords for people to find. 

         One of my favorite ways to combat my competitors is to use google adwords. Yes I know this is meant to advertise your website on google, however, they actually have a pretty awesome tool called keyword tool. This tool allows you to search a particular keyword and then tell you keywords that are similar and what their monthly search volume is, what last months search volume was, and what level of competition you have. It’s a pretty awesome tool I think! This is where I basically get my key words. You always want to find a keyword (using google adwords keyword tool or whatever tool satisfies you) that has a good search volume and a low level competition scale. A keyword may have a high search volume, but if you can’t get on the first page then it is useless. I would rather have a keyword with a search volume of 100 a month where I am the first link, than be on the 5th page of a keyword with a search volume of 1000.  That could be 100 new potential customers that will visit my site, versus MAYBE 1000 new customers that may never even get to your site. Think of this question… when you search on google how often do you go to page 5?      

        In your keywords you should always try to specify a location, because local SEO is much easier then just doing a keyword of ‘dog walker’. That will be almost impossible to get on the first page unless you are posting articles every ten minutes for years. The more specific your keywords are the easier it will be to get on the first page of a search engine. Don’t think which keyword has the most volume, think of which keyword will get you the potential customers and the sales you need. Another issue I have with SEO is all the websites that ask you to pay them hundreds of dollars to keep track of all your SEO. Google allows you to do this for free with a few of their applications, so don’t fall into the trap of paying $200 dollars a month for a company to just tell you what your stats are. It’s completely different if they are actually doing the leg work to get you on the first pages of google, but not if you are doing the majority of the work and just want to know what your rank is and what your opponents ranks are.