Small Office, Home Office Information

by Toni Livesey

Many small businesses don’t seem to understand just how important the Web can be to them. Whether you understand how important it might be for your business or think that it’s never going to affect you this small piece When the Web is a Small Business’ Enemy - the the comments below the post - are definitely worth reading.

by Stuart Livesey

One of the questions that Toni and I often get asked is: ‘If you’re so good at SEO why are you working for other people, why aren’t you doing it only for yourself?’

The short answer to that one is that we are … we just don’t let other people see it. The long answer is that we love working for small business people, it’s a challenge, it’s something different and we love taking the work away from the scammers and providing our clients with something that meets their expectations.

Don’t get me wrong … I certainly don’t rank us as being as any higher than just plain good at what we do. But being good puts us way ahead of the scammers who prey on small business people with promises of instant top listings and contacts with the best search engine practitioners in the business - promises they’re never able to back up.

It’s undoubtedly good that we do like a challenge because search engine optimisation for small business is getting harder - Google and the other major search engines are changing the rules more frequently. While it’s more of a challenge to keep up with those changes it’s also more of a challenge to meet client’s expectations and that means that the conditions are ripe for the scammers to step in.

One leading search engine optimisation practitioner agrees and Client SEO is Harder Than Ever provides an interesting insight into how things are for people like us

Take the test if you dare … you might be surprised

I was

One of the biggest problems for small business - and especially those that operate from a home base - is not so much getting known as being remembered.

You can advertise your small business in all the various forms of media but being remembered when people are chatting comes down to branding. But how do you go about the task of branding you and your small business without spending heaps of dollars?

The Lazy Man’s Way to Branding by Neil Patel gives you all the information you need in just eight short paragraphs. (The comments made by others is also worth reading)

by Stuart Livesey

As more and more small businesses go online to either advertise their services or sell their product their owners are finding that getting a good listing in Google and the other major search engines doesn’t just happen. To get a good listing for search terms that are important to a small business requires a lot of time and hard work and those are things that most small business owners don’t have.

Of course any small business who wants to have their site appearing at the top of the search engine results pages for important terms can pay an expert to make that happen but choosing the right expert can be a real gamble.

One company who makes a lot of noise about producing search engine results offers a service for $2800 which seems not unreasonable especially when you consider that they make statements like this in big, easy to read print:

“Get top 10 rankings in search engines like Google and Yahoo! - Guaranteed”

But as is so often the case the devil is in the fine print where you will find this little gem:

“This service(s) does not guarantee any sales or traffic to your Web site.”

That must leave you wondering exactly what terms this company is going to get you top listings for. If they are terms that are important to a small business then they should at least bring traffic. If they’re obscure terms that no one actually searches for then of course there won’t be any traffic … and all that money will be totally wasted.

It’s valuable property

by Stuart Livesey

Here in town one of the two big web design companies quite often registers domain names for their clients … but never seems to then transfer the control of those domain names to their clients. Instead they continue to be listed as both the Registrant and the technical contact. That’s a sure sign that many small business people simply don’t understand how valuable their domain name can be.

It’s so valuable in fact that control of the domain name should never be allowed to rest with anyone but the small business owner. If you don’t control your domain name you might find that one day your domain name no longer points to your business and that could be a total disaster.

To learn how to protect your domain name follow the link.

by Stuart Livesey 

If your small business does business online then it’s important to know the demographics of the people who are online. I’ve said before that the baby boomers are moving to become the biggest single group online and now some figures from the UK show that the 55+ age group in that country have just about reached that milestone.

You can find the full report here and a hat-tip to Small Business Information

… with writing so small you need a magnifying glass to read it?

by Stuart Livesey

Toni rang me from our shopfront office today and asked me to grab the phone number from a business card on her desk. I found the business card but the number was so small I had to go find my hobby magnifying glass before I could read it clearly.

If you’re going to have a flash looking business card for your small business at least make sure that the important bits can be read quite clearly.

by Stuart Livesey

I’ll leave you to make your own mind up about that one but whatever your view on Google you should find ‘Does Google Really Understand Business’ a little thought provoking.

One of the biggest hassles for any small business - especially the home-office type of small business - is putting a price on your work. Knowing how much to charge for time, effort, experience and a whole lot more is something that a small business owner can wrestle with for a long time.

Pricing a Project is an interest post on that very topic and it is going invaluable for many small business people. The post itself isn’t all that long but there are many comments that have been added and those comments are definitley worth reading too.