So, today Roger asked me a couple questions about LinkedIn, Google Ad Words, and Search Engine Optimization– all in the service of promoting his company. The overall goal is to make it easy for folks who might want to work with him to find out about him. This isn’t one of my major areas of expertise, but I know a bit about it, and I decided rather then handling it in email I’d write it down here so that both Roger and other interested folks can find it in one place.
If, like Roger, you’re interested in promoting your stuff online, here are a couple of things you might want to think about:
- What kind of online searches are your potential customers likely to run? When they are struggling with a problem that your company could solve, what are they typing into Google? How can you reach them at the moment that they are looking for help?
- When somebody is struggling with the kind of problem your company solves, where are they likely to look for free help? Are there places where folks ask questions that you know the answer to? Is it worth providing a little bit of help for free– in the form of FAQs, or documents, or answering questions on a message board– as a way of advertising your services?
- What kind of reference checks are potential customers likely to run on your company? How can you control your reputation online?
Depending on the answers to these questions, Search Engine Optimization, Google Ad Words, and LinkedIn might come in handy.
Search Engine Optimization and Google Ad Words are both ways to make sure that your company turns up at the top of relevant Google searches.
- Search Engine Optimization is a way of designing your website so that search engines place you at the top of results for searches on particular words and phrases.
- Google Ad Words are a form of advertising: you pay Google to show an ad for your company at the top of results for searches on particular words and phrases.
To use either of these, you’re going to first need to figure out what Google-able words and phrases your company needs to appear in the top results for. For an example, let’s say you run a cat-training business and you want to make sure that when somebody searches on “cat-training” or “litterbox problem” your company shows at the top of results.
Once you have the right words and phrases, you can modify your website to support these searches with SEO. There a bunch of little tricks you can use to move to the top of search results– for example, if a particular word appears in the title of your whole website, you’ll be ranked highly for that title. If a particular word appears in the actual URL of your website, you be top-ranked for that word. Since my website has the URL http://arnaoot.com, it will show up at the top of web searches for Arnaoot. This is intentional.
This post was designed to show up high on searches for the phrase “for roger” (look at the URL to see how)– in a couple of days, I’ll check Google and see how I did.
My favorite web designer, Chris Pearson, has some awesome blog posts explaining how SEO works and giving some specific techniques. Here are a couple of my favorites:
- The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs
- Feeling Sandboxed? How You Can Get 53% More Searches with One Tweak
- The Simplest, Most Effective SEO Change You Can Make
There’s a lot more to look at on his website.
One last point about SEO: you might want to think about optimizing your web page as a tool to manage your reputation. The glorious thing about the web is that anyone can say anything and immediately publish it– the worst thing about the web is that sometimes the things that folks say aren’t positive, or even true.
Hopefully you will never have a disgruntled customer or former employee writing nasty things about your company online; but just in case you do, if your website is optimized to show up at the top of search results for your company, this can help you control any damaging things that folks say online. It’s good to have a website under your control that provides the content that is top-rated for searches on your name. This is one reason my website has the URL of arnaoot.com– it means that I have a lot of control over what shows up on Google under my name.
Google Ad Words take another approach to making sure your results show up when potential customers are making web searches. You pay Google to show an ad for your company when somebody searches on a particular word of phrase. The cost will vary depending on the word or phrase– some words are a lot more popular (therefore expensive) then others. There are two cool things about Google Ad Words:
- You only get charged when somebody clicks on your ad, not when it is displayed in search results; and
- You can set a maximum budget for your Ad Words– a top amount that you are willing to pay for advertising per day, and a top amount that you are willing to pay per click.
You can find out more about Google AdWords on Google’s website here: https://adwords.google.com/
LinkedIn lets you try out a different way to reach potential customers. LinkedIn is a social networking site that folks use to advance their careers. Like FaceBook, Tribe, or other social networking sites, folks connect to the profiles of people they know online. Unlike the social-oriented sites, LinkedIn is a place to keep your resume and recommendations from colleagues. You might want to think about using LinkedIn:
- As a way to spread the word about your company’s products and services;
- As a place (outside your own website) to keep references from happy customers, that will show up top-ranked in web searches on your company.
Once you sign up for a LinkedIn profile, you can post and answer questions. I’ve used LinkedIn to ask for referrals for classes or products that people love– you could certainly answer these questions by letting folks know about your company. It also might be useful to search for questions in your areas of expertise, as a way of identifying companies that are interested in what you have to offer.
You can also give and receive references on LinkedIn. This can be another tool for managing your company’s reputation– LinkedIn profiles tend to show up high on web searches, and provide another URL that is under your control but separate from your company website. I like to thank folks I’ve really enjoyed working with by writing recommendations for them, and they often reciprocate by writing one for me back. You can also request a recommendation from one of your contacts. And once you receive a recommendation, you can decide whether to hide it or display it.
Okay, that’s all I’ve got for tonight. I hope some of this was useful, and do let me know if you have any comments or questions.
N
