small business websites

Yesterday, I was a guest on WCCO Radio and I was stressing that almost any business could be adapted to the Internet. The example I gave was a residential window washing business.

You might wonder how a window washing business could be adapted to the web. Here’s how he did it.

The guy had a residential window washing business. He contacted a web designer and had a web site designed where people could sign up for window washing service in his city. Next they designed a calendar with week days between Monday and Friday and times  between 9am and 5pm where people could sign up for window washing service.

Google Analytics is the best free analytics package out there for keeping track of what is happening on your web site. Why do you care what’s happening on your web site? Because if you don’t know what’s wrong, you can’t fix it.

Do you know how many people are visiting your web site? Do you know what pages they are visiting the most? Do you know which pages they are leaving from? do you know which pages they visit the most and how long they stay on those pages?

When was the last time you had your web site checked for broken links? I know I can sound like a broken record sometimes but the search engines really don’t like badly maintained web sites.

Regular maintenance of your web site is an important part of search engine optimization and keeping your web site rising in the search engine rankings. It’s also good for business.

How many times have you gone to a web site and clicked on a link only to get an error message? How do you react? what do you think when a site seems to have problems or isn’t well maintained?

Dick Powell from Sales Force XP forwarded me an article from Chief Marketer Report about “Five Ways To Make SEO Work For You.” While the article was mildly interesting, what really got me going me was the article’s opening comment:

How much attention do you pay to search engine optimization? Many marketers give it short shrift, not understanding that it can be the difference between success and failure.

If you are using Google Analytics like I am for your small business website (it’s free), I hope you are getting the monthly reports and using them to improve your website and it’s performance. However, Google Analytics only allows you to compare your business website’s performance against itself from month to month and year to year.

With Google’s new service, Google Benchmarking, you finally have the opportunity to compare your website performance against your competitors. Every time a competitor signs up for Google Benchmarking, it adds another site’s statistics to help you compare your site to others in your industry.

 The problem with success is that you no longer have time to work on your own “stuff”. if you’re working on marketing and sales, you aren’t getting client work done. And when things are hopping, you’re too busy working on client projects to bother with marketing.

To put it bluntly, you know the old saying, “do as I say, not as I do”? I am as guilty of that as anyone. I have a whole slew of articles on my website on every subject imaginable when it comes to writing copy or search engine optimization. But are they properly optimized for the search engines? No.