Four Website and SEO 2010 Resolutions for Small Business

Everyone seems to be making New Year's Resolutions, and small business owners are no different. Here is a list of four resolutions for your businesses web presence.

1) Start Using Social Media

I am going to start using social media to interact with my customers. First I am going to listen and understand my client's concerns, then I will talk to them.

To listen to your clients, you need to find them. There are several fee based services that monitor social media and report on what is being said about your brand, services, business, or related topics. But if you are like me, you want something free. Start out with Google Alerts and Social Mention. They let you set up a search term(s) and will email daily results for those terms. Twitter Search, and Technorati let you manually search twitter or blogs, but I prefer the previous two services.

Social Media Tool - The Telephone
An other great social media tool is the telephone. pick it up and talk to your current clients for 5 - 10 minutes. Ask them if they follow any blogs or industry people on Twitter. Ask them what their business concerns are for 2010 (other than the economy). Do they have any needs that your company can offer help? Follow up your phone call with a quick email note.

2) Improve my Website's SEO

I recognize that good SEO can help drive traffic to my website. To that end, I will make an organized effort to improver the SEO of my website this year.

• Defining a list of keywords and phrases to target
• Evaluating that list for its effectiveness.
• Implementing changes to improve my sites search ranking on those phrases.

See November's  and December's posts related to basic website SEO review.

3) Improve my Website's Content

I realize that good content is needed to retain visitors to my website and to convert new visitors into repeat visitors. I'm going to review the content on my site to see if it will help clients. Check your content for the following:

• It addresses my client's goals / tasks and is relevant to them.
  
• It easy to read.
• The content is well written.

I suggest you get a copy of Janice Redish's book, Letting Go of Words, it is a good guide for people writing for the web.

4) Measure Results

I understand that if can not measure it I can not tell if it is working.

If there is no method to monitor traffic on my website I will add one. I will implement Google Analytics or some other traffic tracking service that lets me determine from where website's traffic is coming.

You should do this before you make any changes to your website, so you can have a before and after view of your website.