Our chum, David Mihm, very rightly observes that Yellow Pages and Bologna SEO companies capture customers by dint of their simplicity. Buy the biggest YP ad, get the most phone calls. Buy into the idea that submitting your website to Google means success on the web and you’re spared the challenge of any learning curve. While Yellow Pages advertising is certainly a legitimate and aboveboard marketing option, signing up with a spurious SEO company and being duped by their silly to-do list represents lost time, lost income and lost learning opportunities for the small business owner.

As David points out, the trouble with legitimate SEO is that it can be a somewhat nuanced process, takes time and has no simple guarantees. The fishy SEO has a script he is reading over the phone to the prospective client – a script that pares SEO down to 4 or 5 ’simple’, ‘guaranteed’ steps. Generally, by the time the client realizes that these steps brought no results for them, the sale has long been made and the SEO is either long gone or has some second surefire pitch to make in order to squeeze further money out of the business owner. It’s a nasty but successful business plan.

And where does it leave the qualified SEO firm? Frankly, it leaves them waiting for that sadder but wiser business owner to wend his way eventually to them, having learned the hard way that meta tags do not a successful website make.

And, yet, sometimes we can engage those clients the first time around, saving them from headaches they don’t even dream of and correctly setting their expectations for the hard work ultimate success will require on both our parts. And, we can take a cue from David’s article by coming up with our own simplest method of explaining the basics of a sound web effort to prospective clients. We need to give small business owners truths that they can really sink their teeth into.

So, here it is, David!

The Simple SEO Cake Recipe

Ingredients:

1 C. Solid Business Idea
1 C. Astute Market Research
1 C. SE-Friendly, Usable, Research-Based Design
1 C. Best Copywriting
1/2 C. Unique Ingredients Not Found In Competitor’s Cakes

Mix well to form a smooth, lump-free batter. When the batter is ready to launch put in the oven to bake. While you wait for it to rise, turn up the heat by:

• Opening kitchen door and shouting a running commentary on the process out to your neighbors – that will get them talking about your cake!
• Going to your neighbors’ houses and chatting with them about their own cakes, cakes in general and your cake.
• Calling, emailing and visiting prominent neighborhood citizens in hopes that they will take an interest in your cake. Be sure to praise their cakes lavishly!
• Participating in any baking clubs and conversations you can find

Now that you’ve created such a stir about your cake, remove from oven and serve.

Carefully watch the reactions of all your guests as they sample your cake. Did someone spit it out, set their fork down and turn away? Find out why and adjust recipe accordingly. Ask even satisfied tasters if there is anything you can do to improve your cake. Keep working at it. It takes practice and time to become a master baker and the art of perfectly pleasing people is what it’s all about.

Is my SEO Cake Recipe missing any ingredients or steps? You tell me!

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Photo Credits to 427 and Kendiala

My friend, Elizabeth Able, is trying to help frazzled web workers take creative mini-vacations in order to maintain balance and a sunny disposition. I liked this article, and I’m a firm believer in making the most out of moments of repose and fun. Like most of our colleagues, my husband and I tend to work anywhere from 10-15 hours a day, 7 days a week. We continue to practice perfecting the art of taking really restorative breaks in order to keep going strong for our clients.

Right now, we’re taking one of the silliest mini-vacations ever. We picked up a handful of vintage Hardy Boys books at a used book store, on a whim that it would be funny to read a couple. Allow me to sound pompous for a moment in saying that our literary tastes tend to run a bit higher than this on average…and then I’ll gleefully confess that after reading the first ‘thrilling mystery,’ we were hooked. There are now 15 old Hardy Boys hardbacks on our book shelf, and we take little breaks throughout the day to read a quick chapter, packed with high adventure! They keep us laughing with their swell language, improbable story lines and formulaic plots.

How The Hardy Boys Can Help Your Small Business
Like much of 20th century juvenile literature, The Hardy Boys series was a carefully crafted and marketed set of stories, authored by more than one person under a nom de plume. The publisher’s goal was to ensure that the nature of the books kept youngsters coming back for more of the same fun and the evidence of this is far from subtle.

The opening paragraphs of nearly all of the Hardy Boys books contain a sales pitch along these lines:

Frank and Joe Hardy had, of course, solved many thrilling mysteries in the past, beginning with their first case, The Tower Treasure. Their latest adventure, The Mysterious Caravan, had taken them to exotic Africa, where they battled and bested a den of dangerous thieves who would stop at nothing to to possess a golden mask recovered from a sunken treasure ship!

And, as each book winds up, another enticing pitch is encountered:

Having cracked so baffling a mystery, Frank and Joe sat down to a celebratory slice of Aunt Gertude’s apple pie. Little did they guess that their next and most challenging mystery ever – The Melted Coins – was only moments away from beginning.

What little boy could resist these calls to action? Can’t you just picture him running downstairs, official magnifying glass in hand, shouting, “Mom, I have to get The Melted Coins! Please, can I? Can I? Huh?”

Publishers, Grosset & Dunlap, knew not to waste the opportunity delivered to them by an already-captive audience, and your small business should take a clue from the Hardys.

If you are running an e-commerce-based website, any customer considering buying an item from you has already been captivated by some element in your inventory. Why not trot out a few other treasures for her to consider? A customer who is investigating your gardening implements may have it in the back of her mind that she really needs a new gardening hat this summer. Why not show her a few, with the friendly message:

Sunburns happen while you’re raking those leaves. Protect your precious skin with our wide-brimmed gardening hats!

Give the option to add one to the shopping cart and you may make 2 sales instead of one, all off a single visit to a single page of your site.

This works for service-based businesses, too. A customer who is ready to hire you for landscape consulting may not be aware that you also do high weed mowing. Help them notice this like so:

First we’ll plant the garden of your dreams, and then we can come back to maintain it for you with our High Weed Mowing Service. Our customers really appreciate this added service we offer. Let us take long-term care of your gorgeous new garden. Call for a quote today!

It all comes down to understanding that customers tend to have multiple needs in their lives. Once they’ve made it to your website, half the work is done. By clearly demonstrating that you can meet more than one of their needs, you are opening a door to doing more business with an already-won client.

Amazon.com are past masters of the art of tie-ins. They’ve automated a process based on the idea that if I’m looking at a book on petroglyphs, I may well be interested in a new best seller on the Aztec empire. They get me with this tactic over and over again, I confess, and I like this service they provide because it exposes me to new books I might never have heard of otherwise.

On your small business budget, chances are you can’t afford some fancy database that will automate this tie-in feature for your website. But you can smartly invest some time in going through the product or service pages of your site and manually adding these tie-in features where natural connections make sense. Don’t let them take precedence over the main product or service being sold, but do make them visible enough to attract attention during that crucial moment when you have a visitor’s eyes on your page.

Like the Hardy Boys, your customers will pick up on this breadcrumb trail of exciting tie-ins…clues to the greater breadth and depth of your small business’ inventory of terrific offerings. Be proud of what you’ve got and show it off while you have the customer’s attention. No need to make it a mystery!

A new Cre8asite Forums’ member, JoeD, has started a very interesting thread regarding achieving conversions for small business clients in which he asks:

“Ask your non-seo friends to list the places they’ve shopped at online. See if you can find a mom and pop level business that they bought from? If so, what percentage of the list is mom and pop?

I’m going to try this myself, but used this question to illustrate to a client of mine today who wanted to know how to convert sales. I asked her how many times she bought something online from an outlet of her size and she said Zero… Amazon, yes. Major fashion outlets, Yes. Mom and Pop, none.”

Great responses have followed, and I recommend Small Business and Local SEOs check it out. I’d like to add a related but different thought to the pot here.

In my experience, women in my mother’s age group (50s-60s) do develop loyalty to small business websites. This occurs when the small business offers something the customer has been eagerly searching for and having trouble finding anywhere – an ‘it’ factor. When my mother finds ‘it’ on a Mom-and-Pop site, the first thing she does after buying the product is to tell me to go look at the website. She’s excited, and from then on, thinks of that business as a great find.

But, here’s the problem. Once a customer buys ‘it’ from your small business, what else is there for them to do?

Case in point:
In our continuing quest for greater sustainability of our own, my husband and I have started baking our own bread. With store-bought bread at nearly $4.00 a loaf now, we’re not only saving a bundle by baking our own, but we’re also eating some mighty tasty sandwiches around the SEOigloo now. Mix up a batch, call three clients while the dough rises, knead the dough, design a homepage layout while it rises again, answer evening emails during the third rise, and write a blog post while it bakes. SEO and bread baking are a match made in heaven!

Our decision to start baking our own bread sent me on a search for the perfect loaf pans. I needed them to be:

• Non-toxic – no aluminum or teflon coating
• Made in the USA
• Reasonably priced

Internet searches and word-of-mouth recommendations from loved ones resulted in my discovery that GraniteWare was my perfect solution. GraniteWare is that dark, speckled enamel-coated bakeware you might remember from camping. It’s been made in the USA for at least a century and is quite inexpensive. It sounded great, but I discovered it was hard to find. The manufacturer’s site has no e-commerce option (how silly is that?) and Google was providing slim pickings. Then, I discovered Lehmans.com. Their website design looks a little funky in Firefox, but they’ve got tons of GraniteWare and had the exact loaf pans I was looking for. I ordered 2, got them in an admirably short time and am very happy with their performance.

But Now That I Have My Loaf Pans, Why Would I Shop At Lehman’s Again?
Unless a small business is selling something perishable like food, candles, soap, clothing, etc., the loyalty earned by providing ‘it’ gains only a one-time transaction for Mom & Pop. Barring an unforeseen disaster in the kitchen, I won’t be needing to buy any more loaf pans for years. A business like Lehman’s is going to have a hard time surviving if they depend solely on unique sales rather than sustaining repeat business so that subsequent sales are won from already-satisfied customers.

How do you get those subsequent sales? The answer lies in your inventory and your customers’ lives. Lehman’s needs to try to figure out who I am – this woman who bought loaf pans – and what lifestyle I am living that brought me to their door. If they had access to my short bulleted list, above, they’d have some very good clues.

I’m a woman looking for non-toxic products. This means I’d probably be interested in a non-toxic products section at Lehman’s. This might include anything from GMO-free garden seeds to organic fabric.

I’m a woman looking for Made In the USA products, endeavoring to support domestic industry. This preference in combination with my desire for non-toxic bakeware would make it a pretty safe bet that I may be the type of customer who is worried about the news of poisonous imports from countries like China. Lehman’s could respond to this concern not only with a Made-in-the-USA category, but also blog posts that address my worries about imported inventory.

I’m looking for a fair deal. As a relatively young housekeeper, I’m not at the point in life that I’m ready to invest hundreds of dollars in master-chef-level kitchenware. Can Lehman’s find other products that, like the GraniteWare, answer my needs but don’t break my bank? They should certainly try.

I Think Lehman’s Is Onto Me
Further exploration of this interesting little website reveals that they do have other products I might be interested in future. They’ve got a great setup for canning your own jam. Some day, I may have the orchard I dream of, and my good experience with the loaf pans could lead me back to Lehman’s. They do have an American-made category! I think it needs to be a little more visible in the design, because I didn’t notice it on my first visit. And, while I’m not so far off the grid at this point in life that I’m going to invest in a composting toilet, (ehrm…I’m not really sure I ever want to reach that point) I think this company is making good efforts to sustain the interest of a customer like myself who is trying to apply green principles to daily living. Since my purchase, I’ve already told two people about Lehman’s and now I’m telling all of you. How’s that for loyalty?

Going One Step Further
Though they’ve got an email list opt-in, I don’t see a blog on this site. Unless I’ve missed it, this should be Lehman’s next step. Hire a couple of bloggers who know everything about natural living and farming and put them to work writing about anything they can discover the customer base is interested in. Most important of all, start asking the customer, directly, exactly what else they’d love to see at Lehman’s. They could so easily do this.

And, if you’re a small business owner, so could you!

Sustaining your customers means really getting to know them, really coming to understand where they are heading in their lives right now that would bring them back to your website for a wider circle of needs. It’s probably not practical to employ people to phone each and every customer to speak with them directly (although I’d love to see how this would play out) but a blog provides the place for a community to form around the goodness of your business. I had to do a lot of searching to find Lehman’s. Rather than counting on someone new to make those efforts for the next sale, how smart they’d be to keep me shopping with them, since the effort has already been made to win my business.

Your customers are the reason your business exists. Find out what they want.

Time to go take the bread out of the oven.

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* Above photo by Munir