Let’s face it, as a small business owner, marketing if often at the bottom of the to-do list, and by the time you get to doing it, you are likely out of energy and not focused. Running a small business is hard. Yet, this is one area that is hugely important to your success, so do not put this off. We are going to make it much easier for you, and in some ways automate the process to give you a fighting chance against your larger competitors.

First, what exactly is search engine marketing? Well, it basically is just getting the attention of the search engines so that they categorize (rank) your web pages relative to your competitors. Leaving this to chance is guaranteed failure. Read this again…leaving this to chance is guaranteed failure. I don’t know about you, but anytime I read something that is guaranteed, it gets my attention. The fact is, there is not a web page on the internet that has not been promoted in some way.

These exists today a vast number of ways to promote your business. But for the purposes of this article, we are going to only discuss two basic concepts. Everything else on the internet can be managed using one of the two concepts. Social media and Google.

Social media ranges from the giant platforms such as Facebook, to smaller emerging forums. It is a place where individuals are free to comment and decide what they like or dislike. This commenting is called ‘engagement’ and is key to success in social media. Let’s look at Facebook. There are a billion users, and millions of small business pages. Check them out. Most of them have absolutely no activity. No posts, comments, or any activity. The whole point of being in social media is to engage with potential customers. The engagement appears on that person’s social media page where their connections will view the conversation and potentially become interested in your business. The point here and in any social media environment is to engage in meaningful conversations. Don’t know how to start conversations? Then pick an article about something is relevant to your business and post a link and then comment on it, asking others what they think. Pretty basic, but it works. How about offering giveaways, prizes, awards? This usually gets some attention. Here is where it can get fun. The more engagement you create, the higher the likelihood that one of your posts can go viral. This means that people outside your tier of connections start to see and comment on your posts. Viral posts get the attention of the search engines. Make sure your company page has a direct link to your website.

Google. Some say only Google matters. Looking at their 65% market share of the search market, this may be a valid point. But the truth is, you can still be very successful without Google. The basic concept os the same though, so let’s focus on Google for now. Google has software bots that have a sole purpose of surfing the internet and cataloging the content. In order to shuffle through the content effectively, Google has created programs called algorithms that further catalog the content for relevance based on the term that was used for the search. These algorithms are constantly tweaked and released as updates and usually named by the marketing community. Each time the release happens sites are reorganized based on the metrics that Google has determined as current and important. The metrics always change but even in 2015, one of the most important factors in your ranking is the number and quality of backlinks aimed at your site. Think of it as a popularity contest. But not in total votes, but in votes from relevant sites. So, doing nothing, means you have no votes, and will not rank since you are missing a key success metric from your profile. Acquiring these votes is very hard and not something that you will likely want to spend your time on. Fortunately there are ways to automate or outsource this process. Drop us a line and we will be happy to help you sort this part out.

So take these concepts and apply them to your business. Are people engaged? Is your content getting attention?  Is your content more than a year old?

Finally, let’s move marketing up on the to-do list. The more you do, the better your chances are for great success.