What SEO Experts Don’t Understand About Small Business
If you own a small business there’s no doubt that you’ve received at least a dozen unwanted phone calls or emails from a guy telling you about the tens of thousands of leads you’re missing out on. With some quick math you can probably figure out that the entire population of your town will not be calling you twice a day regardless of how you market yourself. Even if your phone was magically getting 60k calls a month, what the fuck would you do with them? SEO is absolutely important, don’t get me wrong. But there’s a big difference between trying to market a website called “i-sell-things-online-and-ship-them-everywhere.com” and Big Joe’s Construction tucked 50 miles away from the nearest booming city. Being a small business, you probably have a strong desire to keep most of your work as local to you as possible because having a broad service window usually costs you money.
You’re not competing against Amazon: Small towns are still a thing and there are countless small businesses that still play a major role in keeping local economies going. If you have a small business in a relatively small town, you’re not competing against the rest of the country for clicks. More likely – you’re trying to stand out over the handful of other businesses who offer the same services as you. Luckily for you, this is a pretty easy thing to do still. Having recently moved to a small town myself, I know exactly how it feels trying to find a reputable business without much information. If you want to find a landscaper, a painter, general contractor, or any other form of labor there are usually two ways to do it. You can ask a friend, or you can consult google. Often times this can even mean both. Getting a referral from a friend is about the best you can ask for because it’s an opinion you can trust, right? When that isn’t an option, this is where reviews come in.
Reviews are the new word of mouth: We live in a world where more and more of our time is being spent on the internet. Whether this is a good thing or bad thing depends entirely on who you’re speaking to, but we almost all play a part in it regardless of what we say. You can ask your phone a question with just your voice and magically it will spit out an answer. Word of mouth is arguably the most effective means of getting business regardless of what any online course suggests. Unfortunately, it’s not something that can be solely relied upon any longer if you want to play with the new generation of businesses. Word of mouth is something that happens naturally when you’re good at what you do and the people who hire you feel like they can trust you. Even enough to suggest someone that they care about works with you. This is huge. Your primary goal should be getting as many NEW people stoked with your work as possible so that they too can share the experience they had with someone they care about. A source they know they can trust. This is where reviews come in. Generating reviews can be hard, and it’s not usually because you don’t do good work! Usually, you’re just not asking the right way. Keep in mind that your business getting a review is a much larger priority to you than it is to the customer and it should be considered as a favor in exchange for good work being done. Having more, and better reviews than the rest of your local competition is among the biggest things that will separate your business from the rest. You need to have a good website, you need to have quality pictures of work you’ve done but reviews are arguably more important that all of that. A website is nothing more than a sales pitch, mine included. But when you don’t have a friend to ask; reviews are how you can tell if a business will be worth your money in 2020.
This is one of the many things that we offer to help your business with. If you’re interested in learning more, schedule a call with us.
To your success, Better Blue Collar
