What do these things have in common? H. G. Wells’ “The Invisible Man”, Harry Potter and your small business? All have the ability to become invisible!

Invisibility for small businesses comes in two flavors – deliberate and accidental.

If you don’t have a website then you are pretty much deliberately choosing to be invisible. That’s not to say people won’t find you on-line but you are making it hard for them and if the only thing visible is a less-than-flattering review you are just beating yourself.

Accidental invisibility occurs when you have a website but can’t be seen by search engines. This happens for a number of reasons including these common mistakes:

• No readable text on website pages. Search engines read text (PERIOD). They don’t read beautiful photographs, or snappy images, or awesome Flash movies – if Google can’t read about you, you might as well be invisible!
• No content. Similar to above but search engines are also looking for more than just text – they are looking for content relevant to the people searching for your service. No content is the second step to invisibility!
• No address. The USPS couldn’t / wouldn’t find you without an address. Google is just the same – without a physical address it assumes that you don’t really exist!

Are you invisible? Here’s a simple test – go to Google Maps and enter your zip code. Then enter your type of business. If you don’t appear on the first page of the results – guess what? You are invisible!

Worried that you might be invisible? Need to talk to someone about this with no obligation? Speak to me! Contact me here.