Rightsizing Your Business by Bill Welter

Author:Bill Welter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: business, profits, rightsizing
Publisher: F+W Media, Inc.
Published: 2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Virtual Considerations

Twenty or so years ago, companies, especially small and midsized enterprises, asked whether or not they needed a website. The answer was yes, but it wasn’t emphatic for many businesses because they knew that a lot of their business came via the trusty old Yellow Pages and they knew they had a darned good ad. They were in the right category and people would find them when they needed them. Besides, everybody used the Yellow Pages.

Sorry, but for all intents and purposes, the physical Yellow Pages is dead even though the sales people are in denial. So now the question you should be asking yourself is, “Do you land on page one of a Google search?” That location is “prime real estate” because so many people assume that page one lists the most popular results, and many people equate that with the best choice.

How do you get better “real estate” in the virtual world? In much the same way that you would hire a site-selection expert to find the best piece of physical real estate, you want to get your web person to explain “search engine optimization” to you and help you understand what you can do to improve your location on the web. Many large businesses have a cadre of web-savvy people on their IT staff, but what about small businesses? Do they really need all this technology stuff?

The short answer is, yes. Brad Shorr, the Director of Content and Social Media at Straightnorth.com, an Internet marketing agency, has this to say on the subject:

SEO (search engine optimization) should be part of the marketing mix for any business with a website designed to generate leads or orders. SEO is a set of techniques used to put your site in front of people who are searching on Google and other search engines for the stuff you sell — but don’t know that you sell it. In short, SEO sends new, qualified prospects to your site.

At a high level, SEO is about identifying popular search terms (keywords) people use when they are looking for your stuff, and then making certain pages of your website rank well for those search terms. The better a site is optimized, the bigger share of search traffic it gets — with less going to the competition. Depending on the competitive landscape, SEO enables a business to dominate, or perhaps just survive. In only very few niches can SEO be ignored.

Businesses need to ask themselves if they want to be on Main Street or a side street. Your website is a location for your business, and you have to consider it in your rightsizing thinking every bit as much as you consider physical site selection.

There is much more to be said about what you should be using on the web, and you’ll find that in the next chapter, Infrastructure Technology.

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