Austin SEO & Small Business Marketing

I hear the ques­tion all the time… "How can I get more sales or cus­tomers from the inter­net?"  In fact,most Austin small busi­nesses I run across have a web­site but get almost noth­ing from it!  THIS SHOULD NOT BE!  What's worse is that many busi­ness own­ers I've talked to have real­ized they need to do some­thing about it and have hired out work at huge prices that are still get­ting them NOWHERE!

You might even think that by pay­ing for place­ment on the search engines via "Pay Per Click" that it would turn things around.  Then after spend­ing per­haps thou­sands of dol­lars you find that while a few more peo­ple found your web­site,it didn't do for your busi­ness what you thought it would do… namely increase it.

Why is that?
To under­stand why this hap­pens you really have to step back and look at your site as if you were some­one who is not famil­iar with you or your busi­ness.  Look at your web­site and ask the ques­tion…
"What is there about my web­site,the pre­sen­ta­tion of my busi­ness (my ser­vice,my prod­uct) that would "make" a vis­i­tor want to call me instead of any other Joe they find on the web or the Yellow Pages?"
If your web­site is sim­ply a pre­sen­ta­tion of your wares,then the hon­est answer to that ques­tion is "Absolutely Nothing."
Before you ask the ques­tion,"How can I get more peo­ple to my web­site?" You really need to ask,"So what if more peo­ple do find me?"
Take a look at almost every web­site you can find for busi­nesses in your city and you will find that almost all of them tell more than you want to know about how to find their place,out­line the prod­ucts or ser­vice they offer and many will have pic­tures of their kind and won­der­ful staff. If you are a searcher and find this site,your thought process might go some­thing like this:"Great,they have what I'm look­ing for,they promise great ser­vice (like every­one else) and who cares who's on their staff,I don't know any of them any­way. Gee,their web­site would look bet­ter if it was more bluish-green (ran­dom thought other than "Should I call"). I won­der who else has this stuff in Austin?"
In other words,if noth­ing makes your store,your prod­uct or your ser­vice stand out from the rest,you might as well have never had them come to your website.
But isn't this blog about Austin SEO and here I am talk­ing a whole lot of "Marketing?"    

Yes it is,but I think it would be a dis­ser­vice to you to think that just by get­ting more peo­ple to your web­site will auto­mat­i­cally result in gobbs more sales. My point is,if you are going to invest your time and money in get­ting your site found on the web,you also need to include mar­ket­ing in the equa­tion. For instance,it is easy for you to under­stand that you could have the best con­vert­ing web­site in the entire world but if no one finds it,you won't sell a thing. By the same token,if you have every­one in the world find your site but it does lit­tle to help con­vince peo­ple that YOU are the go-to place for this prod­uct or ser­vice,sure you will make more sales. The law of aver­ages will give you that. But you will not reach any­where near the level of increase that you were expect­ing. (More on this later.)
Here's an exam­ple of what I mean. Here is a busi­ness that used to worry about not being able to sell their stock fast enough. (It's live exotic ani­mals,so not sell­ing their new crop could be a "lit­tle prob­lem.") By chang­ing her main page up a bit and in this case adding video (in the mid­dle and bot­tom of the main page),she now has a wait­ing list for her yet unborn crit­ters. (See:Exotic Pets For Sale) In Castleberry Safari's case,the addi­tion of video made her site dif­fer­ent than most of her com­peti­tors in that her vis­i­tors learn more than "Just the Facts" about her busi­ness via the web. They also get to know more about the owner and her prod­uct. Because of that,she now sells out before she has product!
The added ben­e­fit of her videos too is that as far as Austin SEO is con­cerned,Google loves video! Between hav­ing her videos posted on sev­eral video social net­works and pub­lish­ing some con­tent about her ani­mals,her traf­fic has increased from 200 vis­i­tors per month to over 2,200 per month in less than 3 months time! Check out her site and com­pare it to other exotic breeder's sites that you find on the web. Then ask,"Who would you rather buy from?" "Who's site would you remem­ber?" "Who's site would you be more likely to bookmark?"
I wish I could show you what her site looked like before she took a "mar­ket­ing" approach to it. Suffice it to say that it looked pretty much like 8 out of 10 of the other breeder's sites that you'll find via a quick search for "exotic pets."
So the ques­tion comes,"How can I apply this to my Austin hair salon or Austin law prac­tice or my sport­ing goods store or my nation­wide per­sonal defense gad­get site or my (insert descrip­tion of your busi­ness here) site?"
Austin SEO Academy

Well that's what Austin SEO Academy is here to address. I encour­age you to make com­ments to post and arti­cles that you read on this site. I'll do my best to answer ques­tions or com­ment on obser­va­tions made. I would also encour­age you to attend my Austin Meetup meet­ings where we can go over these kinds of things face to face to help you mar­ket your busi­ness on the web bet­ter and help you get your busi­ness found by peo­ple who are look­ing for "your kind of stuff."Be sure to sub­scribe to Austin SEO Academy on the form that you find on this page. I am very con­fi­dent that you will find it worth your while. Just enter your name and email address to start receiv­ing thought pro­vok­ing mate­r­ial that may very well help you to do with your busi­ness what I did with mine. (5 time increase over 3 years — $250,000 to $1,300,000) So sub­scribe Now! In this blog I will be divulging all the things that I used to make this hap­pen and show you exactly how you can do it your­self. Use it to help pro­mote and increase your own busi­ness. This blog and newslet­ter right now are com­pletely free. That will change at some point in the not too dis­tant future,but cur­rent sub­scribers will receive a hefty dis­count over new sub­scriber fees. So be sure and sub­scribe to Austin SEO Academy right now!
You may have noticed the big pic below.
This shows the results of the most recent study of how peo­ple look at search results in their browser. The rea­son this is impor­tant is because if you are cur­rently spend­ing money on PPC,you might seri­ously con­sider get­ting your site found in the nat­ural search results. Simply put,you can keep your money and get more vis­i­tors by doing so. Contrary to what you may have heard before,it's not an insur­mount­able job to get there and it can be done fairly quickly. Did I men­tion it saves you money. You can even do it all by your­self! I'll have more on this in the newslet­ter and on this site.
Of course,as men­tioned ear­lier,  you really need to have some­thing on your site that makes prospects want to buy from you rather than the "other guy."

http://www.austinseoacademy.com/