Small Office, Home Office Information

We came across a small business here in Hervey Bay the other day desperately needs some good search engine optimisation for it’s website. People coming from the search engines are very important for this business and in the years ahead the importance of that traffic from the search engines is going to grow. If this small business was in the United States then it would be seeing it’s competitors doing a large amount of their marketing on the Internet.

We found that this small business does not even rank in the first four places on Google for its own name and that is a very bad sign indeed. So we identified three reasonably easy steps we could take to improve their ranking not only for their own name but for the search terms that are important for the products they sell and then we contacted them.

We were surprised to find that they already employed a business here in town to do their search engine marketing for them and, knowing the business involved, they were undoubtedly paying a lot of money for very little return.

If you’re employing others to do any sort of work for you are you really getting what you pay for? Do you even bother to check to see if you are getting a positive return on your investment?

If you’ve tried newspaper advertising without much success here’s a little story that might interest you.

About five weeks ago CopyText Online and Total Website Management (our combined team) built a new website for a client here in Hervey Bay. While Hervey Bay Jet Ski was mainly aimed at the local market there was also an attempt to attract leads from further afield because the business is the only Kawasaki Jet Ski dealer north of Brisbane.

With all new websites that we build for clients I carefully watch the search engine listings as they begin to appear because we just don’t offer web design, we offer search engine optimisation with every website we build - and this one is doing very well for nearly all the important terms. However good rankings don’t always translate into leads and sales so I like to keep in touch with the client to see what’s happening at his end.

On Friday I dropped in to the business to see how the website was performing from the client’s point of view. It’s always a bit of a scary time because sometimes you just never know if a website is going to live up to its expectations or not but this time I had absolutely nothing to worry about.

In the client’s own words - “I’ve had more phone calls from the website than I’ve ever had from any of my newspaper advertising.”

Now obviously that’s not going to work every time and it may not work for you but having a website built by an experienced web design team like us is something that you should seriously think about if you want to generate leads and sales for your business.

And how many sales has it generated? I’m not at liberty to reveal that but let’s just say that our client is extremely happy with his website!

Back at the end of September I wrote about an impending move out of the home office and into real office space. You can read about that in Coming Soon and Prepare Your Small Business for Growth but one thing I forgot to mention was that we were changing the name of the business to Total Website Management better reflect exactly what we were offering.

I have to tell you that before I tell you that finally, after some delays caused by an over-worked signwriter, our sign is finally on the door. The old name is staying there too but the new sign is the one that definitely stands out.

The move has already proved to be a winner with a new client coming to us from the same office complex and another small business that was thinking about moving into the complex.

by Stuart Livesey 

Wow, it’s hard to believe that it’s been 11 days since I was in here last … but it’s been a very interesting 11 days. Some of that time I’d love to repeat while others parts of it I hope will never happen again.

My daughter Adrienne … who’s part of our team at Total Website Management has been up here for a week and in our spare time we’ve been talking servers and team management and that’s something Toni, Adrienne and I could do all night

Toni’s mum became very ill on the weekend and we discovered how depressing the intensive care unit’s waiting room at our local hospital can be and of course there has also been the ongoing work with our regulars plus with a number of new clients who have come across to us from our competitors too.

Picking up work from the competition is something that we’re always a little cautious about doing. This is a small town and we all have to live here so we usually let our reputation for outstanding service attract clients from other web design businesses.

And that’s something that you can do no matter what area of small business that your involved in. Basically all you have to do is let your satisfied customers do the work for you while you set a standard of service that is so far beyond what your competitors are providing that they just can’t catch you.

Of course you’ll need the skills and experience to provide that level of service but if you have them then beating the competition is easy and no matter what they try you’ll still stay well out in front.

And knowing what level of service you will need to provide is simply a matter of benchmarking your business against those of your competitors. For some small businesses the comparison is encouraging but for others making that comparison can be rather difficult when they find that they don’t compare well with the opposition.

If you’ve got really good staff in your small business you’ll do just about anything to keep them happy … within reason of course. But would you help them with the housework?

That’s exactly what some big businesses are now doing so why shouldn’t we think about it too? You can read the full story here

I don’t know what it’s like where you live but here in Hervey Bay we get a lot of junk mail in our letter box at home. There are glossy brochures from businesses both large and small and most home owners simply take it out of their letterbox and drop it straight into the recycling bin.

But sometimes there can be some valuable leads for your small business tucked away in that junk mail if only you take the time to look for them. So if you get junk mail delivered into your letterbox have a look through it before you throw it in the rubbish.

You just might be throwing away a lead that could generate some income for your small business.

Wherever your small business might be located these figures should be interesting.

Discover Small Business Watch conducts a monthly survey of a 1,000 small businesses in the United States that employ five or fewer people. A comparison of their October and September figures is interesting.

Business confidence among those surveyed has dropped considerably in those two months but cash flow has actually improved. In September 46% of those small businesses that were surveyed reported cash flow problems but in October that figure had dropped to 42%.

In September 40% of those surveyed thought economic conditions were improving but by October that figure had dropped to 35%.

Only 32% of small businesses surveyed considered the overall United States economy as excellent or good in October - a drop of 7% from the previous month.

You will find the full report here … but you will need to register as a visitor.

Well this has been one crazy week and the fact that one of our competitors here in town has given us some free advertising has really left us scratching our heads. We don’t know whether to laugh or write to them and thank them.

Sometime last week one of our competitors sent out a glossy multi-page brochure to every small and medium sized business in town that they thought might interested in paying them to design a website. Included in the brochure was a list of their current clients and one of the clients websites they claimed as their own was one we had built and currently manage.

Anyone who looks at it will see our name and our links on every page plus we know this client quite well and he will happily tell anyone who calls that he gets the best service from us. He’s well-known around town and his opinion tends to be respected by many other small business people in town.

You just have to love free advertising like that