Marketing

Small business website promotion tips

Over the course of the last two years, I have seen small businesses throw their precious marketing dollars in website design, content and promotion. Apart from a good graphics designer, you do not have to spend on web-site promotion. Given good quality content, you can appear in the top 20 search results without spending a dime. This is our experience at IQI Strategic Management. We follow a similar process when we promote our clients’ web-sites as part of their overall marketing strategy.

I started blogging in earnest only last month. The earlier months were a blur – setting up the business, marketing, networking. I also started tracking hits diligently since March. 99% of the site traffic is coming from Google. I was stumped. This domain was born in December 2006. There was practically no content on this site from December to February. And now this site is getting hits from Google search results. Wasn’t it nearly impossible to rank high for a new site? Didn’t it take time? In fact, the site is just linked in a few web directories (and recently in few blog carnivals). My curiosity piqued, I started to dig more. (By the way, Google analytics is such a great tool for such analysis.) More surprise was in store for me.

I had expected initial traffic to come from MSN search since I was indexed there within a week. But on looking at the search engines that brought traffic to the site, MSN was no where to be seen. It is Google all the way – with one AOL search and one Earthlink search.

I wanted to know the keywords that people use to come to the site. “Strategy, Strategic, Structure, Implementation, Differentiation & Leadership” topped the list. I was not too surprised since the organization name (IQI Strategic Management) contains “Strategic” as one of the keywords. But Strategy? Structure? Culture? Leadership? I have just 9 articles that contain the word “leader” and/or “leadership” and a similar number for “culture”. I wanted to know the reason my site came up in the top search results. Of-course I am assuming that no one clicks beyond the top 20. If I have not found what I am looking for in the top 20, I know I need to refine my search.

“Culture and strategy” was the phrase used when a reader arrived at this site. I searched today for this phrase. If the phrase was in quotes, Corporate Culture and Strategy Implementation article link was number 6. But if I search without the quotes, the article was number 38 today. What a difference the quotes make! The operative phrase is today. Because when this person came to our site, this particular article was positioned on page 2 - between 11 and 20. In the course of four days, this article dropped at least 18 places.

I went back a few days. This time I chose a phrase “role of leader in strategy implementation” a reader used to get to our site. The article, Issues in Strategy Implementation: Leadership, was positioned number 10 and displayed on the first page. It was able to retain this position even today; i.e. 10 days later.

Let us compare the above two. The link and title contained all the three words the reader searched for in the first example: culture, and, strategy. (Google discounts the word AND) This site comes up in page 4 today. The link and title contained leadership, strategy, implementation for the second search. Shouldn’t the first article also rank higher for those keywords? Both articles followed SEO guidelines. The only conclusion I can reach is that there are a number of pages on culture and strategy that have a high page rank than ours and hence it slipped in position. I checked my page rank too – it is 0, which is not surprising at all since the site is brand new. So if page rank is important for sites to appear in top 10 or top 20, then how come our site with a page rank of 0 appears on page 1? I would welcome your thoughts on this.

Given the fact that our site has appeared in the top 20 in a month tells me that I am doing something right. So here is what I did:
1. Make sure the URL, link name and the ALT/Title tags contain the key words. See both my examples above for reference. All links on my site follow this rule.

2. It has been close to three weeks since I stopped submitting site-maps to Google. But the new articles I write are indexed. Hence, it is not necessary to submit site-maps often. Initially, I used to submit every three days. But once Google has indexed a few pages, it will get the rest.

3. Update your website with new content regularly. I like to blog and share my experiences and I guess Google loves it too.

4. Google has indexed a post on our blog - Carnival of the Capitalists at Show me the money. This article was posted on 9th April at 2:28 pm. It was indexed within 24 hours. Update your website content often and regularly.

5. Be patient. This is the difficult part. Resist the urge to keep checking Google results. Frequently checking (defined as more than once a day) is a waste of your time. Google will get you if you have quality content.

6. Meta tags – I swear by title and description meta tags. Do not exclude this from any of your pages and make sure they are unique in every page. Also the content within the title and description MUST appear your body content. Ben at the Instigator Blog has written a good article on writing good headlines.

If you can get eyeball hits and page hits for free, why would you want to pay to advertise your site? Your marketing dollars can work harder elsewhere.