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Small business marketing needn’t cost a mint — certainly not the oft-cited 20% of gross revenue (or is it net revenue? I can never remember).
It pains me to hear of struggling businesses shelling out a fortune for low-quality leads or burning thousands of dollars monthly for Google Adwords that don’t convert.
There are cheaper and better ways to market your services.
The benefit of AI to our customers is that we can churn out more copy in less time. The quality improves in most cases — not because AI produces superior copy (which it doesn’t), but because we have more time for careful edits and coherent copy organization.
The act of writing forces you to articulate your thoughts. The process reveals contradictions in your reasoning and gaps in your knowledge.
It demands discipline with language. Dangling participles and comma splices are okay for tweets but look sloppy on a blog post.
Blogging reinforces the value of clarity and brevity, attributes lost on those of us stuck in the “more is more” school of writing or 1,000-word college essays. We think we’re adding clarity, but more often, we’re just adding stuff.
I myself was skeptical — until I looked at the numbers.
Blogs will never convert as well as service pages. They don’t have to.
Their bounce rates are high. That’s okay.
For plumbers, appliance repair technicians, and many local service businesses, blogs are an indispensable marketing tool.
Building a website that generates more than a smattering of traffic takes time, patience, know-how, and effort. Over 50% of local service websites get fewer than 16 visits daily. Even when agencies build them.
Organic SEO is an investment. It pays big dividends in the long run. Short term, it’s going to cost, just like advertising.
Most small business websites average fewer than 16 visits a day. 13% are lucky to see 5 daily visits. (Source: BrightLocal) "If you build it, they will come" doesn't apply to unoptimized small business websites. So what's a small business owner to do? Sadly, you...
On most local business websites, the “Contact Us” page is an afterthought.
It shouldn’t be. It’s potentially the most valuable page on your site.
The task of “designing” the page, if you can call it that, usually goes to a developer with little UX experience. A graphic designer may contribute an image or two. What more do you need?
Guidance, for one thing. UX analysis: what’s the customer trying to accomplish, and how can you remove any barriers to conversion?
Maybe you need a new website, and maybe you don’t. It usually benefits the agency to rebuild your site because they can charge for more hours and place their stamp on the project: “Just look at what we did!”
But will the project benefit you and your customers?
So what is it about WordPress, other than its ever-growing popularity among novices and hobbyists, that makes it the poster child for search engine optimization gone wrong?
I believe it’s because so many people building WordPress websites don’t plan or value SEO. Or they assume that WordPress can do the SEO work for them. Just install a plugin, and you’re golden!
Google has made site load speed a point of emphasis.
As page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 123%.
Other Google research found that the average time for a page to load fully on mobile is upwards of 15 seconds!
