Invisibility – a cautionary tale for small businesses

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! is your business 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: (more…)

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As a small business owner do I need to worry/think/do anything about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Whether your company has a website or not, most people have heard something about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).Often it’s from the sales and marketing manager who instructs a staff member to “do something about SEO” so that their site can appear on Google’s first page (good luck with that by the way…). Sometimes it’s from an “SEO” company who can absolutely guarantee that they’ll get your site on Google’s first page of results – maybe they should talk to that staff member? More often with small businesses its one of those topics that gets discussed once or twice and is then consigned to the “someday, maybe never” file.

To answer my own question – I’m here today to tell you that in this Google-dominated, internet-driven, 24/7 world SEO isn’t just something to worry or think about its EVERYTHING if you want to get found on the internet. Here are my top 5 SEO “do’s plus 5 “don’ts” that every small business owner needs to be aware of: (more…)

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