When it comes to marketing in the current economy, small businesses need all the help they can get. They don’t have the ad budgets, the personnel or the time that the bigger competition has. But none of those factors really matter to search engines, and SEO is a great way to both level the playing field and steal marketshare.

Here are a few tips that small businesses can use to improve their SEO and user experience.

1. Turn everything into content

Content is still King. Search engines still love unique content, and the more useful content there is on your website, the more opportunities you give searchers to find your products and services. Rob Snell gave a fabulous presentation at PUBCON South, and one of the main takeaways was how to turn everything on an e-commerce site into content. Here are some ways to “free” extra content on your site. Here were some of his tips:

• Record everything and transcribe it all into text. Interviews, conversations, product DVD’s, personal opinions, etc.
• Turn support emails into FAQ pages on your site
• Turn PDF’s into HTML pages (although PDF files can rank on their own)
• Start generating videos of everything

2. Make it personal

Small businesses have a major advantage that most bigger businesses don’t:  A personal voice. By making your voice heard, you’re showcasing your authority in your market, and adding trust. Buyers love hearing recommendations or reviews, and are more influenced to buy from those vs. product feature and benefit pages. Consumers use search engines to research products, and other than the /> [...]

Fri May 21, 2010 05:20 am

At a recent dinner with a buddy of mine from Microsoft (who helped launch Bing) – I learned a lot more about the search market and a very important trend that can effect the future of B2B Marketing.

When you think about the search behavior of the average person online – we are mostly conditioned to search in very routine ways like pulling up a Google search page, using the toolbar in your browser etc. And we tend not to stray from that behavior now. It’s almost an unconscious choice for most of us.

But when it comes to search on a mobile device we mostly use very specific apps, like Yelp for Restaurants or Flixter for Movies – where the search result is much much richer – you not only get results that are more relevant but you also get a chance to make a reservation, get directions, buy a movie ticket right there within the application.

If you look at the share of mobile  search that the Google app has it is minuscule compared to their share of the browser based search market. This is why Google is so interested in buying apps like Yelp or launching their own phone like Nexus One since they realize this is the year mobile search really takes off and if they just stick to browser based search their overall share will diminish.

OK so what does this mean to B2B Marketers?

While there is no app yet for finding and reading Thought Leadership on your iPhone or an app for finding advice from an Expert in a particularly difficult technology topic (business idea?) perhaps there will be shortly. Maybe apps like foursquare could have a business to business version in the near future. I think as B2B Markete/> [...]

Tue Jan 26, 2010 09:20 am