Business owners roll their eyes in disbelief when I tell them about Chicago SEO Small Business Marketing Consultant. They stop laughing when the hot leads start pouring in.
The reasons for disbelief are many:
- My business is different,
- Only luck gets you on page one in Google,
- Nobody buys services like mine over the internet,
- Nobody can have mailing with that kind of response rate,
- If I got that kind of response, my website would crash
- My web designer says it doesn’t work that way
- Websites are only to have a presence, for people to check you’re for real.
The causes of disbelief aren’t. Actually, there are only 2: misinformation or lack of information. I understand both. There’s a lot of misinformation out there, requires a tremendous effort to sort through. A lot of time. And when you’re running a business, you’ve got a lot to do without trying to learn search engine optimization. SEO is not difficult, neither the on-page optimization nor the off-page optimization. But it takes time. And if you make mistakes, you don’t see results. Worse, some mistakes get Google to de-index your site. Then nobody finds you. Besides, being successful at SEO can cause you problems, if you have not properly integrated your website in your sale process. Most people think that making their website work with their sales process requires extra employee, or, at least, extra hours from existing employees. It doesn’t. Properly set up, websites do not require much attention. If you’re going to need extra people, it will be to produce more widgets, serve the extra clients, keep track of the extra revenues. They do require maintenance.
You can use your website two ways: with or without SEO.
With SEO means your website generates leads for you. If you’re good at SEO, it will generate hot leads, if you’re not it will generate leads. If you’re bad at it will generate traffic, not leads, or nothing, depending on how bad you are. Without SEO, you can use your website to keep your prospects interested in your company, to keep your company in front of them when they go from ‘I’d like to have that widget/service’ to ‘Let’s buy it’ mode. In either case, the website needs to be properly set up and maintained. The maintenance is more intensive in the first case. But more rewarding. Generally speaking, website designers are good at creating beautiful to look websites that don’t add a penny to your revenues, let alone profits.
Generally speaking, SEO consultants are good at figuring the right keywords, getting backlinks, getting Google to take note of your site, in other words. Marketing consultants know about copy. People who know about copy and sales letters and about search engine optimization, like yours truly, are rare. As a matter of fact, Chicago SEO Small Business Marketing Consultant exists because of that very rarity. I build and run websites. Like everyone else, I talk about my day at the office. Often to other business people. Business people who have beautiful websites that nobody or almost nobody visits. And they wonder how I get more visitors to my websites than then do when my websites are not nearly as gorgeous and are so much smaller. And I tell them. And they roll their eyes in their heads, it was worse than if I had spoken to them in a language of a lost tribe from Mars. Or they think I’m pulling their leg. “People don’t do that.” But they also wonder if I could do the same to their business website.