Business Coaching

SEO rankings can be finicky, unless you are consistent with what you do.

If you have been reading this blog, you know that search engine optimization (SEO) is a key part of business marketing these days. Every business wants to be sure that they can be found when someone uses a search engine to find them.

But sometimes, your SEO ranking can drop because of factors you may not have considered. Among those factors are age of the site, your site’s content, the keyword density of your articles and the links that connect your site to other sites. There are solutions for these problems that can take your SEO back to the top of the search.

If your company’s site is old, that’s a good thing because it should be easy to find and stable. The problem can be if the content on your site is old and static, or never updated. The easiest way to ensure you’ll always have fresh content is by blogging: just write a regular blog an post it on your site.

Another revelation as to why your SEO ranking might be low is a lack of content. Many search engines won’t even list a site unless it has at least 10 pages on it. Keyword density also plays a big role in SEO ranking. Be sure to pepper the key words you believe people will search when looking for your business in articles or blogs throughout your site. The most places you use key words the better. Finally, you always want to have reciprocal links on your site with other businesses so people that view their sites will naturally navigate to yours.

So what can you do to ensure your SEO ranking stays high? First off, if you aren’t computer savvy, hire someone who is. Second, use multiple websites for your business. The more places you can be found on the Internet, the better your chances that customers will be able to find you. Finally, be sure to constantly update your site to be sure you have fresh content and enough pages to be properly searched.

Yesterday we reported Google has listed Facebook as a top competitor. Then Hitwise released a report saying Facebook was more visited than Google. It seemed like social Media had overtaken the search engine! Huzzah!

Not so fast.

Industry Pace has pointed out a few facts that make the above false. A major biggie that affects the above statistic? Hitwise purposely didn’t count how often people visit both sites via mobile phones. That’s a huge chunk of people right there that weren’t even counted!

Read what else Hitwise ignored on Industry Pace’s article page here.

What does this have to do with business coaching? A lot — if a client ignores parts of their business that should be helped, a business coach can’t help them. If they tell you they know their numbers and give you wrong ones, or try to cover up “embarrassing” parts of their business, all will come out in the end, and even though that’s a better situation, you’ve wasted a lot of time where you could have been helping their business.

Keep that in mind next time you take on a new business coaching client. Encourage honesty…it’s the only way clients can be held accountable.

Google used to have just two competitors...that number has grown.

Google reported just two competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft, in their 2008 10-K report. For 2009, however, their number of competitors grew to 10.

Facebook, Twitter and Yelp are listed as Google competitors, as well as specialty search engines like WebMD.

Google probably didn’t anticipate social networking sites or specialty/specific search engines being their competitor, but that’s a fact. As Google stated: “Our filing reflects the reality that we compete against a number of alternatives, including traditional search engines, e-commerce and specialty search sites, social networks, and other forms of online and offline advertising.”

Something like this that’s happening to Google is important to keep in mind for any business. As times change, new competitors in various niches can pop up…and your business should be prepared for anything.

In business coaching, business owners will hear often that they should always be prepared. If the recession didn’t teach it enough, it rings true; more competitors in seemingly different niches can come up, as is the situation for Google, or with technology advancements, what many businesses found during the recession.

To see if your business might benefit from a business coaching session, take our Business Health Check. A healthy business makes for a happier business owner.

What would you decide:

In 2006, some school students in Turin bullied a schoolmate, suffering from autism, and even worse, the incident was recorded and uploaded to YouTube. The Italian police became involved, and notified Google officially about the offending clip–it was taken “down within hours.” Google’s team then cooperated with the police to identify the perpetrators, and the data was subsequently key in convicting the female uploader, who received 10 months community service as a penalty, along with other involved male students.

That’s normally where Google’s involvement would end, right? Except not in this instance. Italy’s legal system finds Google execs to be at fault.

Google’s blog clearly presents the poor victim at the heart of the affair as suffering from autism, but Reuters reported that the the youth concerned had Down syndrome, and that the legal case was brought at the request of the victim’s father and an Italian advocacy group for Down syndrome sufferers, Vivi Down.

Read more about this case here. Who knows how this will turn out, but it sounds like a tricky situation. How do you think this will turn out for Google?

Tracking progress with online marketing is easier with these tools.

After finding online marketing opportunities, like we said yesterday, you’ll need to track your “wins.” This can be a confusing and daunting thing to do, too…unless you know the tools that can track your leads for you.

Google Analytics helps yet again! It tracks referrals from the company’s social Media profiles. And twinfluence and Twitalyzer are Twitter-specific tools that measure how influential and
far-reaching the company’s Twitter presence is.

Klout tracks the impact of your posted content and links, including which audiences are exposed to the content and how they interact with it.

Translate the information about results and figure out the positive financial impact on your
business. Key performance indicators can come in various forms, like new revenue generated, a good amount of time and money saved, or a good financial return on investment.

Armed with this information, hopefully it will become clear how much social Media marketing is helping your business…or how much more you need to work at it in order to make a positive financial impact on your business! If you want to find out what needs work in your business quickly, take our Business Health Check.

When it comes to search engines, do you use the reliable standby Google, the newer Bing, or any of the other search engines out there (Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, etc)?

Here’s something interesting that may sway some die-hard Google users to start using Bing: On New Year’s Eve, Times Square was evacuated when the bomb squad was called to investigate a suspicious van. Don’t worry – it was nothing. But what was interesting was what the two search engines turned up as people in the city were scrambling about for information.

Search engines pull up all sorts of websites depending on keywords, including results from Twitter and Facebook. Simply typing the generic “Times Square” into Google turned up news results that were two days old about New Year’s Eve events and preparations for the upcoming festivities. When typed into Bing, however, yielded real-time headlines from various news outlets like ABC and CNN, thus giving the scrambling Internet searchers information they were looking for.

Now, this isn’t to discredit Google at all. In fact, Google was showing real-time results, too..theirs were just hidden. Google’s real-time updates page under “show options” and then “updates” with any search, had all the good stuff; headlines, tweets, everything that described what was going on in real-time was on that page.

If Google just moved its real-time results to its main search page instead of hidden on another page, it’d not only be better for Google, but it’d be great for search engine users: less frustration because they find what they’re looking for.

Use this Google/Bing example to think in terms of your own business…is there anything that your company could improve upon and beat competitors to?

Everyone’s talking about how blogging can expand a business’ reach further. Most business owners over the age of 35 are skeptical.

Well, it won’t get you instant success, but truth is, a business that consistently updates its own blog with info about the company and issues in its industry are more well-known businesses because of it.

For example, Google has a blog where it writes from time to time about ideas and concepts the site is thinking about unveiling (the latest is something called “Living Stories“), updates to its browser, Google Chrome, complete with screen shots, warnings of scams using Google’s name…the list goes on and on. When you’re as big as Google and have a lot going on, there’s a lot to blog about. Not that they need the SEO rankings, but a blog does help with SEO, and make users’ experience better by providing how-tos and useful information.

Want a lesser known example than Google? Coudal Partners, an advertising agency in Chicago, has a blog on its home page. Some people might wonder why they’d have a blog linking to interesting yet random articles and discussing various issues on the company’s home page. But not only does it make them stand out, fresh content helps their SEO ranking and the variety of creative topics their employees blog about show they get creative inspiration from just about everywhere at any place in the world (a post of theirs links to “Subway Architecture“. Cool stuff. ).

If your business starts its own blog, not only is it a great social Media tool that provides networking by way of commenting on other blogs, people commenting on yours and leaving links to your/their blogs, it can also spread the word about your company by doing the following:

Increasing your site’s SEO (if you don’t know what these three letters mean, they stand for “search engine optimization”): SEO is something that is hugely important to businesses. Whenever someone searches an online engine for a keyword relating to your business, you want your business to be at the top of the page. It can be used to gain search engine traffic for given keywords or search terms. Your blog offers the opportunity to promote your Web site for hundreds or even thousands of different keywords.

Search engines particularly like promoting blogs because they offer a large amount of content that is updated and added to on a regular basis.

Easy Access to Company news and Info: However, be careful you don’t blog in press release style – if a blog is all praise for the company, it doesn’t sound genuine. Blog about company news and info that is useful and interesting, just like Coudal Partners and Google. People would always rather read genuine, high-quality content instead of filler information, too.

Expanding your Reach: A blog is a great way to find new potential customers. Write about the niche your business caters to in the market, and anything interesting within that niche, and people looking for anything related to your business could find your blog in a search. Keep in mind that updating information on the blogs and blogging regularly can keep people coming back to your blog for information and could become customers, too. Regular content is imperative to the success of any blog. This content needs to be informative, accurate, and written in a way that will appeal to your visitors.

Creating Fun and Familiarity: Faceless corporate blogs aren’t that fun to read. Why? Besides being dry and boring, they also don’t feel very inviting. Going back to our point about high-quality content, familiarity is very important with content – if the reader can’t relate to it or feels it’s just a higher up writing from a press release, the reader won’t take it to heart. Keep this in mind, and make it work for your company by designating a person (not necessarily the CEO) or a team to do the blogging. If you read Google’s blog, you’ll see that even their posts have a bit of personality to them. It’s easy to do.

All in all, a blog on your company’s site might be worth looking in to – hey, it’s good enough for Google – and it may be the extra piece your company needs to separate it from the competition.