If you are a growing business — you have slightly different concerns than your smaller brethren to the south of you.
Smaller businesses should probably concern themselves with these online marketing issues as well, but they more than likely don’t have the time or resources. Your growing business, however, should be addressing all of these in some capacity.
SEO for your brand
Search engine optimization involves dominating the search engines for particular keyword phrases that you feel are important to rank well for.
If you own a company called Garibaldi Athletic Shoes , you may optimize a web page for a keyword such as
‘buy nike shox’
And you definitely should be doing search engine optimization for this keyword — that is if you sell that shoe.
But what you may not consider is that you should also be optimizing your website for the terms
‘garibaldi shoes’
‘garibaldi athletic footwear’
‘garibaldi athletics’
This becomes more and more important as you continue to grow, because there are going to be other businesses that will steal website traffic away from you if they can. And they will be free to do so if you don’t ensure that your site ranks for these keywords.
SEO for your products
If you manufacture your products with unique names — for instance you are Align Technologies that has created Invisalign braces — you will need to protect that product name through your SEO. You can bet that there will be lots of talented Search Engine Optimization professionals attempting to outrank your company for the keywords
‘invisalign’
‘invisalign braces’
Protect your trademarked product names with a solid SEO strategy.
Monitoring Brands on Twitter
One of the costs of growing larger is that you will be garnering more attention. People will be taking shots at you on Twitter and maybe for good reason. One of my favorite things to do when I am on hold for a ridiculous amount of time with any company is to send out a Tweet complaining about it. It is always interesting to see if the company responds to the Tweet.
You need to be monitoring this channel more than any other. Respond by thanking those that praise your company and try to help those that are complaining. At the very least, respond to show them that you are listening.
Getting a Social Media Policy
Growing larger, generally means employees. Whether you like it or not, these employees are using social media channels.
It’s time for a social media policy.
I would stay away from banning social media amongst your employees. Put a good policy in place and let your employees police each other. Common sense usually prevails here but you will need to have some way that you will respond to employees that don’t comply to the policy.
SEO For Reviews of Names, Products
Often, before someone will purchase something, they will go back to Google and type in product name + review or persons name + review.
For instance, if your name is Jill Marinaro, you live in St. Louis, you sell accounting services and own a company called Gateway Accounting Professionals, before I do business with you I will Google:
‘jill marinaro review’
‘jill marinaro saint louis’
jill marinaro testimonial’
‘gateway accounting professionals review’
‘gateway accounting professionals testimonial’
Make sure your SEO strategy takes these types of keywords into account. You can easily rank well for these keywords is you address the situation before there is a problem. In other words, it is much more difficult to unseat a Google result that gives a bad review of your business after you discover it. It is much easier (and much less expensive) to optimize for these types of keywords before they become a problem.
What are your thoughts? What other online marketing issues are you considering as your company grows?
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Good information. Thanks for sharing.