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Basic Truths About Search Engine Optimization.

Several companies offer SEO Search Engine Optimization to maximize the traffic flow for a website in the Internet. Many of these companies offer the necessary tools for businessmen to manage their marketing strategies. Aside from these tools, these companies offer guidance in using these tools so the business’s website will appear in the top ranking search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, AOL, and MSN.

But what is SEO Search Engine Optimization and what is it for? Essentially, this is a technique for many businessmen to make their websites visible on the first pages of top ranking search engines. This is in consideration of the keywords typed in the search engine search boxes. Aside from the use of keywords, the relevance of the content is also an essential part of toggling or manipulating the search spiders over the Internet. When the website address is in the first page of a search engine result page, there is more likelihood that there will be more web visitors and this can mean more business because it give the company more visibility, thus it give more potential for revenue and doing business.

What with all the jargons, most of these companies offer the main tools in affordable packages and these packages include tools like link extractor, SEO reports, index ranking and other reports that will help Search Engine Optimization get the necessary analysis to get more traffic for their websites. These companies will surely help their customers’ right from start or beginning to the end.

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The first major sign of trouble on the horizon is poor cash flow. Either the business owner doesn’t have and execute a marketing strategy that works (more on that in a bit) or it is because the people who owe the business owner do not pay their bills on time. Everyone, it seems, is trying to hang onto someone else’s money for some strange reason. One business owner confided to me that a large organization he did business with paid him more than 90 days after he sent the invoice in for approval and payment. In the meantime, he had to pay all of the bills for his company and his family.

The sense of urgency at the large company, apparently, was non-existent. The individuals who open the mail, process the invoices and cut checks aren’t concerned with the “problems” of the small business providing the products and services to their organization. Why should they? An employee of a large company gets a paycheck week in and week out, along with vacations, paid sick days, paid holidays and a lot of fringe benefits. Since they don’t work for a small business, it is unlikely they have ever had to deal with cash flow issues.

The business owner, on the other hand, lives and dies by the daily balance in their company checkbook. That figure determines whether or not they can hire more people, add inventory and improve the selection of goods and services, upgrade their offices and equipment, and serve their customers and clients better.

The Santa Clarita Valley (where I have now lived for 18 years) is home to nearly 11,000 businesses, and the vast majority of them are small. I am not going to recite the numbers, but there is a very good chance that if you are reading this, one of your neighbors is employed by a small business located in your town. You can help that neighbor, you can help your neighborhood, and you can help your city and every one who lives there by simply paying the bills that you owe to small businesses on time. If you can’t pay, then don’t ignore the bill—call the business and make some type of arrangement to take care of the obligation you have created.

If by chance you are someone in a large organization who does business with small organizations, and you have anything at all to do with the check processing system, please take the time this next week to see what can be done to reduce the time it takes to get a check cut to the businesses that provide services and products to your organization. Remember that your neighbor, the small business owner, doesn’t get a paycheck each and every time payroll is cut. They get what is leftover, after everyone else gets paid. In other words, they get paid when the check from your organization arrives in their mailbox. That vital difference may mean keeping the doors open and people on the payroll.

Another small business storm cloud that seems to be crop up as regularly as a summer thunderstorm over the San Gabriels is lack of a marketing strategy. For the life of me, I cannot understand how a business owner can run a business by sitting down and waiting for customers or clients to “find them.” Then analogy would be similar to trying to find a specific sentence on specific page on a specific web site on the Internet, only without a search engine. Yes, you could do it, but it would take a long while. In the meantime, the business will go out of business, the facility covered in dust and cobwebs.

If your business is not where you want it to be in the greatest of all economies, then something is wrong—very wrong—with how you do business. Your marketing, or lack of it, may be the culprit.

Marketing isn’t a science, and it isn’t an art. It’s a blend of both. It is also a set of skills that can and must be learned if one is to have a business that is successful. Learning can be painful but it is also definitely profitable (see last week’s column).

One can learn marketing by reading. There are thousands of books on the subject, and many of them are available for free at your local public library. Start reading today—the library is open on Sundays! While you are there, pick up a video tape on any number of subjects related to getting and keeping customers: sales, marketing, customer service, and so on. You can also pick up audio tapes to listen to when you drive, or during slow times during the business day.

Brian Tracy is a great author with many wonderful books to choose from. His books have been converted into tapes and CDs so there is no excuse not to read or listen. Harvey Mckay has authored many books on the process of gaining and keeping customers. Jay Conrad Levinson has written a series of books on “Guerrilla Marketing” which are inexpensive and timeless in the information that is provided. If you can’t put to use something from these three authors, then you should close up your business and get a job working for someone else!

The one way out of a period of poor cash flow and slow sales is to generate more revenue, from better customers and clients. There are going to be periods of rough weather and turbulence in every business and life. How you choose to deal with those times will determine your ultimate business success. Will you turn on the radar and scan the horizon to avoid bad weather, or will you fly into it without knowing the duration or intensity of the storm? Only you can decide.

It would be nice to believe that every organization is a proponent of continuous marketing (which means marketing in both strong and slowing economies), but not everyone has done so.

Many of the organizations that did not market when times were good are now suffering. Others that should know better are becoming nervous as the bad news of the economy is reported and so these firms are cutting back on marketing and other expenditures.

When times are good, and business is plentiful, businesses are often so busy they do not have time to market. They are busy taking care of current client demands and as a result they did not take the time to look into the future. They might be aware of trends in their own industry and often hear or read about the macro economy but fail to make the connection between the two and how it might affect them.

Marketing, particularly in a slow economy, has to move to the top on the list of company priorities. In a good economy is should also be a high priority.

Marketing is an investment in the future of the organization. Firms that cut their marketing expenses at the first sign of economic trouble live in the short-term.

While it always makes good sense to manage expenses, cutting for the sake of cutting without a rationale other than just reducing expenses is foolish.

The problem with most business leaders is that they want the “quick fix” to turn things around.

There is no magic pill to take and no shots the doctor, however talented, can give a company to make marketing work.

Marketing takes time. Because it takes time, getting started and staying with it is essential. The results of efforts and expenditures today may not yield fruit for months, perhaps even years. The sales cycle from the first, positive impression the organization makes until the sale is completed could be a lot longer than desired.

Everyone wants results tomorrow but it rarely works that way.

One of the critical differences between the mindsets of “marketing as an investment” versus “marketing as an expense” is that organizations who take the long-term view intend to be around for the next twenty years.

Those taking short-term view see marketing as something that they must do, almost with a sigh of “If I have to…” With a foundation of regret, what will the results be?

Proactive marketing forces companies to see what is happening in their own industry, and take notice of the technological, governmental, environmental, cultural and political environment that could affect them.

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In periods of rapid expansion, most companies can throw up new products and services and not worry about the downside. In a slowing economy, the opposite is true. A slowing economy allows every company the opportunity to take a step back and determine where limited resources will be spent. This is the opposite of random cutting and slashing of advertising, creative and promotional spending.

By taking time to analyze the business and the external environment, a company can seek the answers to these questions:

What items produce the most revenue?

Which clients are more valuable than the rest?

What is the strongest competitive advantage?

What products and clients are the most profitable?

What geographic markets make sense to expand into and which should be exited?

What market segments should continue to be invested into and which should be put on hold or exited?

Google Web Site Marketing

Once these questions are answered, strategies can be developed to exploit the opportunities that have been thoughtfully considered.

All of this helps to provide the company with additional focus and better direction to navigate through difficult times.

Conventional wisdom would state that when the economy slows down, companies should cut back on spending and “hunker down” to ride it out. Market leaders don’t think that way.

Starbucks has and will continue to raise prices and at the same time, regain focus to further increase sales and profits during this slowdown. The company is focusing on increasing per store unit sales through elimination of unprofitable items, adding new items to their core offering (beverages) and increasing training of employees. The firm has also reduced previously announced expansion plans.

Even before this, Starbucks has enjoyed a higher per ticket order than all other “quick serve” restaurants and this renewed focus will increase the differential. All this is taking place while the price of coffee and other items purchased by Starbucks are increasing.

Regardless of the size of the business or the size of the budgets, your clients, now more than ever, need to know that your company is alive, well and ready to do business.

If they don’t hear from you, you can bet that they will be hearing from your competitors who aren’t hunkering down but are ramping up.

On the front page of a newspaper I read with great interest about several local business owners who were interviewed and quoted about declining sales revenue, a reduction in customer buying and the impact of increasing costs on their businesses.

My question to anyone facing slowing or declining sales is to ask “what is your prospecting plan to turn things around for your business sales?”

Far too many owners take the reactive position of sitting and waiting for clients to come to them. You know who they are; you drive by places every single day that you will never visit.

The retail industry is among the worst offenders, filling a store with merchandise and then expecting people to find the place, come in and spend money just because the store is there. When sales do not materialize as hoped, blame the high cost of gas, increasing property taxes, rising insurance premiums and customers cutting back on purchases. Deflecting the blame for lousy sales is easier than looking in the mirror.

By doing more of the same, the business will get more of the same. The alternative is to treat a slowing economy as an opportunity. This is a time to revise strategies that are not working and to do things differently. It’s a chance to take a new look at how to get more clients.

What does it take for this to happen? Two things: first, a change in mindset from being a victim of the economy and second, being proactive and taking and accepting personal responsibility for what needs to take in the business to make things better.

The fastest and easiest way to increase sales is to ramp up marketing and sales efforts to the existing base of clients. A strong relationship should exist with these clients and they should be open to doing more business. If a strong relationship does not exist, the question to be asked is “why not?”

The cost of gaining a new client is at least seven (7) times more expensive than keeping an existing one so do what it takes to keep clients.

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There are a number of books available on prospecting. They can be borrowed from the local public library or from a bookstore.

Recommended for your reading are (in no particular order) are books from these authors:

1. Harvey Mackay

2. Tom Hopkins

3. Brian Tracy

If your business does not have a loyalty program now is the time to consider starting one. There are many examples of loyalty programs to use as a model for creating one. All of them have a single goal in mind: to retain loyal clients.

1. Hilton Hotels

2. Marriott Hotels

3. Hyatt Hotels

4. United Airlines

5. American Airlines

That same base of clients can yield another critical piece of information essential for growing revenue. What is needed is an understanding of how current clients were acquired.

Put another way, what marketing methods turned those prospects into loyal clients?

Ideally, any business trying to grow should develop a prospecting plan. Every business should have at least three, and not more than five, different prospecting activities to gain new clients. This will increase the possibility that the activities will work but each activity will have to be tracked for effectiveness.

Start with the list of current clients and analyze how they became clients. Chances are there are at least two and as many as five marketing methods to be yielded from that assessment.

If more are needed, look first to the competition to find out what is working for them. Second, look to other industries for ideas and concepts.

Larger businesses usually have more money and tend to spend it on mass advertising. Smaller businesses have the ability to be more nimble and can experiment with different methods of marketing to determine what works. Doing an email blast to those that have opted in to receive messages of interest could strengthen a relationship with a local business where trust and friendship already exists. Getting that same email from a large business might be considered as spamming.

In order to be successful at prospecting, four things need to take place. While it would be nice to delegate these, the truth is that the top executive is probably best suited to handle them. The side benefit to this is that it forces the top executive to work on the business and not in the business.

The first is that time needs to be set aside for prospecting. It cannot be an afterthought; it cannot be the last thing on the daily list of things to do. It needs to be done when the top executive is fresh of mind. If the business needs more business, the time has to be scheduled, honored and kept. The more time is scheduled, the better.

The second is that distractions cannot be allowed. This means not playing around on the computer, turning off the cell phone not being interrupted. The person doing the prospecting has to be focused on that single activity during the committed time.

The third is to develop a prospecting calendar each activity should be listed on a master calendar. Each day should have specific activities listed and budgets assigned. Not every activity needs to have a dollar cost; picking up the phone and calling a client costs little. Sending an email blast to those who have given permission to learn about something new being offered costs nothing.

The fourth is to stick with it. Prospecting takes time. According to research conducted on prospecting, 89.8% of all sales efforts are ended at the fourth contact with a prospect.

Prospecting is a marathon, not a sprint. Either you are in business for the long haul or you are not. Either you want your business to be a success or you don’t. If you do want to be a success and you want to be in business for more than a short while, make the commitment to prospecting.

Oh, and one more thing, don’t procrastinate on prospecting. Start today. Start right now.

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