If you read any business startup guide it’ll talk about the usual issues of company formation, tax issues, raising finance and the business plan before touching on the topic of promoting your business.
There’s nothing wrong with these business guides until you come onto the topic of promoting your business. You can almost always count on the fact that the following marketing techniques will be mentioned:
- Direct Mail
- Leafleting
- Newspaper Advertising
- Public Relations
Radio advertising, telemarketing and PPC advertising also tend to be mentioned frequently. But where’s the mention of affiliate marketing or the opportunity that social media marketing presents for small businesses? And most importantly, where’s the mention of search engine optimisation?
Recent research has illustrated that Google alone is responsible for navigating up to 75% of online traffic and yet business startup guides systematically neglect to mention the importance of SEO. If don’t have an online business with good visibility in search engines then for the majority of internet users you don’t exist. You wouldn’t set up a retail store in a remote countryside village, so why launch an online business without carefully factoring in your SEO requirements?
It’s true that optimising a website for search engines, especially Google, takes time, but this isn’t a valid reason for putting it off. The perfect time to consider your SEO requirements is in the development process of a website as it affects three fundamental aspects of web design:
- Technology - is your website going to use Flash or HTML? How clean is the code going to be? What about its speed as this is becoming increasinly important when optimising your website? If geographical targeting is important to your business where’s the best place to host your site?
- Internal Linking Structure - how are your pages going to be linked together so that Google can find them easily? What are your most important pages going to be? Do you need an extra navigation along the bottom of your site to help with this?
- Copywriting Requirements - what web pages do you require? Perhaps individual product pages are a good idea? And what about a blog?
Many of these are essential questions that need answering in the early stages of an online startup. People who neglect SEO requirements at the start often end up looking at an expensive redesign six months down the line, before waiting a further six months for the changes to take full effect. A 12 month wait with limited natural traffic from search engines is a long time for many startup businesses to survive.
If you ever needed any evidence of the importance of high search engine rankings consider the case of Wikipedia and how its traffic has increased by 8,000% through search referrals. Mahalo is another example of a site growing almost exclusively through search engine traffic.
Therefore don’t follow those business startup guides word for word. When you reach the marketing section consider fairly new online promotion techniques such as social media marketing and, whatever happens, don’t neglect SEO.
