Internet Approaching WoM As Top SMB Referrer — Survey
March 24th, 2011 // 5:47 pm @ Greg
When I saw the American Express survey noting that “more than half of small business owners say they need help with search engine marketing”, I immediately thought $$$. But after reading through the article a bit further, I realized that the opportunity ahead is to bring awareness to the SMB community of the many available Do it Yourself resources.
So if we have learned anything from the past couple of weeks of “Media Takeovers”, we now understand more than ever flash communities DO exist online.
- Rebecca Black – Friday Song 45 Million Views in about 45 days
- Charlie Sheen -1 Million Twitter Followers in 25 hours and 17 minutes
This new mainstream insurgence has reminded us about the most important base function of the Web: influence first-sell later! In both of these examples, the flash communities were assembled through viral elements (AKA Word of Mouth) in this case of Word of Clicks. American Express found that 82% of business owners surveyed felt that new customers discovered them through word of mouth as opposed to a 66% discovery path through the Web. Arguably these two channels are based on the same influential origins.
Getting back to my awareness campaign of the available Do it Yourself resources, SMB owners listen up…investing some of your own time in learning Local SEO may be one of the best investments you can make on behalf of your business. Learning, and more importantly getting comfortable with, this influential source of referrals, is time well spent.
Consider this; the major search engines and social properties want you to serve them your most relevant data in the correct format and in return they will reward you with ranking. So lets start here with my Top 5 Do It Yourself Local SEO Resources:
1) Get a scorecard of your site with WebSite Grader
2) Next figure out what Google wants at Google Webmaster Central
3) Now figure out how to satisfy Bing atBing Webmaster Tools
4) Don’t forget about Yahoo’s needs at Yahoo Site Explorer
5) Finally learn how to manage your Yelp profile too.
Essentially, this is a great top 5 starters list for helping to manage the upcoming shift from Word of Mouth business referrals to Local Internet online referrals…Good Luck!
Category : Blog
