How do your potential customers find you? They don’t know your name. They just know what they want. Surveys have shown that mostly they go online. In Australia I think it is something like 86% of people go online to research before they buy.
The next obvious question is how do your customers find you online. This is something a lot of businesses do poorly. They spend a lot of time and effort getting good listing results for their business name. Now that is important but customers who don’t know you – don’t know your name yet!
Your business needs to list high in the search results for searches your customers are doing. This involves a bit of a science and a bit of an art! It all hinges on the research you do. How well you know your market and your customers. Luckily this is something you can learn.
Let’s take another restaurant example. Here in Australia I have searched many times for restaurants in suburb name. I rarely get a listing for a specific restaurant. More commonly I get those frustrating online guides with which I can rarely find what I want or the information I am after.
Taking that it would be pretty easy to dominate listings for your local area if you optimized your site for restaurant suburb, restaurant area, restaurant city. For example I just searched restaurant my suburb which has 100 000 listings but on the front page only two of those listings are for sites belonging to actual restaurants and only one of those above the foldline (the area you can see without having to scroll down).
One of those was actually a good site – easy to use, had trading hours visible, contact phone visible, and an easily accessible menu with prices – all the things I actually search for. The other is a beautiful looking site but because it is a flash site I can’t be bothered waiting for it to power up and be ready for me to start looking for what I want to know. Summing up it would be easy to get the top listing in my area for a restaurant and offer a good site. You are competing with only one other (which may explain why it always seems busy even though when I was there it seemed to be over-priced, have poor quality food and poor service).
Your customers need to be able to find you. Online it is easy to reach many and I’d give you the example of if my suburb has x population and 86% search online you could be reaching x people but I can’t find the population online! Welcome to Australia.
Australian business has been slow to go online, but it doesn’t have to be. I learnt most of what I know from James Schramko and can now build you a simple site in about 15 minutes. If you want it to be really pretty it’ll take a little longer but it’ll be enough to get you online and ranking.
If you want to be in control of your online business strategy you need to learn and understand the process. You can be the leader in the field, blowing your competition out of the water. But be quick because business is catching up. There is already a restaurant in my area doing a good job (which surprised me) and it is reflected in how busy they are.
You can do it to for more information about learning internet marketing and for business website stuff. Make the choice to dominate your market!
I can relate to what you are saying – I haven’t even unwrapped my Yellow Pages this year. If I am looking for anything I use the internet. Especially regarding my business, I feel that if the company I need to deal with doesn’t have an internet presence, then they have not adopted 21st century techniques to their business. Too out of touch.
Great article, thanks.