Guide to Small Business Internet Marketing

As a small business owner, you have a unique advantage over larger competitors: you’re able to make a serious difference to your small business by making another £20,000 or £30,000 a year. When you know how to market your small business effectively, the returns can be much bigger than this, and have a serious impact on the profitability and growth prospects of your business. Here are things you can do to accelerate your businesses online performance.

PPC Advertising

PPC advertising is one of the quickest ways to see a big return on your online spend. If you sell wedding planning services, for example, you can bid on search engines for words related to your industry. Wouldn’t it be good if your small business showed up when someone typed in: “UK Wedding Planner”, “Wedding Planning Services”, “Find A Wedding Planner”, “Qualified Wedding Planner”? You can catch consumers that are showing intent to buy the products and services that you provide. And, you only pay for the visitors that click through and visit your website. That way you can choose to bid a lesser amount or higher amount depending on how many clicks it takes to get one sale on average.

You can also measure the effectiveness of your advertising, and track what keywords lead to sales, using analytics software. If you do not already have analytics software installed on your server, you could choose to use Google Analytics. This is free, and a great way to get started.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

You can make changes to your small business website so that it ranks higher in search engines for keywords that relate to your business. As a Manchester plumber, you could try and show up for words like “Manchester Plumbing Services”, “Plumber Manchester”, “Manchester Plumbing Company” and loads more. With SEO you do not pay the search engines any money to show up in the results – you pay an SEO provider or make the changes to your website yourself. This means that SEO will usually provide a lower cost per lead in the long term, but it can often take a year or two before your investment will become profitable.

Online Networking

This is particularly valuable for those that provide B2B services. You can use networking websites like LinkedIn, or you can participate in industry blogs and forums. This will allow you to build contacts, who work within your industry, and they may require your services directly or they may know someone who would like to use your services. When you are networking it is important that you do not make it obvious that your intention is to drum up more business; you should show that you are passionate about your industry, and try to engage in the conversation. This will help to build your businesses credibility and should help to deliver more sales in the long run. You should also consider starting to blog if you know your industry; you will improve the traffic to your website and you will gain a strong reputation within your industry very quickly if done right.