Marketing For Small Business

Does your business have a website?
Can your local clients find your business at the top in the search engines?

Well if the answer is no to either one of those questions, you are in trouble.

The marketing firm Webvisible recently did a survey of over 2800 consumers. About 2000 of them had used the search engines to search for a local business with about 1000 doing it within the past 90 days.

There are over 50,000 people in the local area of Flagstaff, AZ. About 18,000 of them have searched for a local businesses in the last couple of months.

Will they find your business or your competitor? Are you in a position to take advantage of all the locals searching for local products and services in your area?

1) Do not use splash pages Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means........
"abandon ship"!

5) Avoid using audio on your site If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

Well if you are not online.............You do not exist for 30% of the population.
You are out of the running.

Don't be left on the other side of the digital divide. Cross that bridge now!
If you want to stay competitive, you will need to establish Your Presence Online!
Let Edwards Consulting help.

Call or Email me now for a Free consultation

Edwards Consulting
928-286-6101

Email me here