Every small business should be a web publisher
Posted March 23, 2009 – 1:50 pm
If you run a small business, then you can probably increase your website traffic significantly if you think more like a web publisher than a small business owner.
In contrast, most small business websites have very little content – and the content they do have is very specific to the company’s products and services. As a result, the only people who ever find the company’s website via a Google search are people who already know about the company and are searching for it specifically.
Why? Because a web publisher publishes content designed to maximize search visibility and increase visitor traction. They figure out how to use search engines like Google and Yahoo to generate as much traffic as possible – and then they figure out how to organize their website to maximize user engagement once visitors find the site.
If you think like a web publisher, you will create a much better small business website that:
- Drives more traffic via search engines like Google, and
- Achieves much higher traction and engagement with visitors
What is a Web Publisher?
Becoming a web publisher involves stepping beyond simply describing your company as you might in a printed brochure (even an pretty comprehensive one), and instead involves focusing on creating a mini-information portal rich with information about the need your product or service fulfills.
So, for instance, if you were a web publisher, instead of just stating you are a massage therapist (or whatever) in 10 words or less, you would provide an expansive discussion of what you do – ideally something that spreads over several web pages going at the topic from a few angles. Your new website might also include information on how a consumer should select a provider in your field, maybe provide links to some helpful resources, perhaps include a write-up on localized trends you see in your field, and so forth.
Anything you can think of that makes sense and allows you to write a bunch of content because, after all, Google thrives on words – more words means a happier Google. A happier Google means you will show up in more searches.
As you create this expanded content, you need to purposefully and systematically weave into it all the keywords people might use to find your site via a search engine like Google. Without being ridiculous, you need to state these keywords forwards and backwards, with and without modifiers, in bold face, in headings, in all manner of combinations several times on a page so that you completely cover the waterfront of possible terms web searchers might use.
All the while, you need to ensure that your new content makes sense to regular people who might read it. Google search engine spiders (the software that ‘crawls’ web pages to index their content) are very smart indeed. They can tell the difference between ‘real’ content that has a genuine purpose and contrived content that is simply a jumbled regurgitation of keywords. Your pages don’t need to be filled with Nobel prize winning original thinking, but they likewise can’t be complete drivel.
Once you’ve posted it, Google search engine spiders will find this new content, index it, and, if conditions are right and you’ve done your homework, you will see changes in your website’s search performance within a matter of weeks, possibly even days.
While becoming a web publisher may sound hard, it is well within the skillset of any small business owner with a good knowledge of how people buy your product or service – decent writing skills and a bit of technical know how definitely help, too.
Plus, you don’t need to transform your website overnight. Every additional bit of information – even a longer paragraph – is a step in the right direction. If you can string together several steps every month for several months, you’ll definitely be moving the needle.
Can All Small Businesses Become Web Publishers?
Becoming a web publisher will work especially well if you are a small business, media site, or blog serving a targeted niche. The target niche can be a certain geography (like a handful of towns or a specific region), a certain kind of product or service, a certain kind of customer need, or some other distinctive angle.
Really, the key requirement is that you be in a business for which web searchers would use relatively distinctive language to find you. This is true even if you provide a relatively common service – like dry cleaning, kitchen remodeling, massage therapy, dentistry, and the like - so long as you can find a more distinctive, yet commonly understood angle to combine it with – like by adding town names.
There are many examples where a web publishing approach could pay off for a small business. For example, companies that provide any kind of local service or product have a built in mechanism that is ideally suited to web publishing: creating content that targets compound keyword phrases, such as ’specialty services + specific town names’.
In other words, if you provide products or services to a local market where you can name the specific towns (or regions) that people would use to search for you, then web publishing could work very well. Some examples include:
- Remodeling contractor, home improvement contractor, interior designer, architect, and other types of home services professionals
- Massage therapist, chiropractor, fitness coach, and other types of alternative health care professionals
- Doctor, dentist, optician, veterinarian, and other types of medical professionals
- Lawyers, accountants, tax professionals, or other white collar professionals
That’s because many, if not most, web searchers will use keyword phrases that combine two or more elements into a single compound web search. Searchers combine elements because searching for just one or the other element generates results that aren’t useful.
For instance, here are some 2-element keyword phrases: ”remodeling contractor Boston”, “massage therapist Sydney”, or ”accountant Los Angeles”. If people are searching for your business using compound keyword phrases like this, then you probably can leverage web publishing to good effect.
How to Tell If Web Publishing Will Work for Your Small Business
There are many factors that could influence how well web publishing would work for your small business, but here are a few things you can do to get a rough idea of the potential:
- Create a target list of keywords / keyword phrases that web searchers might use. In creating this list, know that while people do use the most obvious phrases when searching, they always use an incredibly wide range of more obscure possibilities – many of which may seem illogical or uninformed to you. By all means, if you have analytics on your site to track actual keywords used to reach your site, include these in your list. As a general rule, make your list of targeted keywords more inclusive rather than less. For some companies, the list could be a few hundred terms, for others maybe as few as a dozen.
- Refine your target keywords list using Google Keywords Tool. Google’s Keyword Tool is an extremely effective way of identifying alternative keywords people may be using to find you. You can also use it to estimate actual search volumes for your terms. To use the tool, enter the preliminary list you just generated and then see what other ideas the tool generates. Expand your master list to include as many additional terms as seem relevant. Note that less popular terms may well be easier to score well on because there is less competition for them.
- Run actual searches on your keywords to see what you are competing against. In order to see if other companies have beaten you to the punch, go to the Google search page and type in your various keyword combinations one-by-one. For each keyword, scan the results and look for two things: 1) how many total results are shown, and 2) how good are the results, especially the top 10 results.
- To see how many to total search results there are, look for a line like this “Results 1 – 10 of about 17,700 for ‘kitchen, remodeling, wellesley, ma’ ” in the top right part of the page. If the number of results is relatively low – 17,700 is very low (believe it or not) - then that’s a good sign. If the number of results is very high – like 10M or more – then that’s not such a good sign.
- To see how good the results are, you want to click through to the actual web pages for each of the top 10 results. As you view each of these pages, look for 2 things. First, is the content on the page highly relevant to the search? In other words, does it provide meaningful information that addresses the keyword topic well. Second, does the page have a high Google Page Rank? To see how to do this, read our post on using the Google toolbar for DIY SEO. If the content relevance and/or the Page Rank are low, then that’s a good sign for you. If both are high, then that’s not so good.
- Figure out what your current Page Rank is. Use the Google toolbar to figure out your own Google Page Rank. If you have a PR 2+, then that gives you a decent foundation to work from. If your site is PR 0 or unranked, then you’ve got a bunch of preliminary work to go to get yourself on the map. A web publishing approach will definitely accelerate such an effort, but it may take a while before it really starts to work (a while being several months, probably).
Once you’ve completed these steps, you can stand back and assess what the web publishing potential is. The potential is very good if you find there are a 10+ fairly popular keywords which have <5 high quality search results. For example, if only the first 2-3 results for many of your search terms are useful, then you can probably create some pages that’ll put you into the top 5 for those terms without too much effort.
If, on the other hand, you find high quality results already exist for many of your terms, then getting yourself into the top 10 could be challenging. It is definitely still worth trying, because you will almost certainly increase your traffic over current levels, but if you can’t reach the top 5 (or at least the top 10), then you’ll unfortunately still be missing out on a lot of the searches
Recap
Many small businesses have ineffective websites that miss out on much of the search volume generated by people searching for the products or services they offer. Small businesses can use a web publishing approach to maximize their search visibility and increase website traffic. Web publishing is well suited to companies that target a specific niche that web searchers would use distinctive keywords to find.
One Comment
I’d echo your thoughts on alternative keywords- if your business in a very popular keyword category, it’ll be hard to make the top 50, let alone top 10 results in Google. But you can take advantage of more specific or alternative keywords to help boost your results.
Another thing you can do is get local. Google and Yahoo both have services where small businesses can list their websites. It helps in pagerank, and it’s something your web design company can easily set up for you in 10 minutes. or, do it yourself!