Small Business and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - Do It Yourself

There were the days when small business didn’t need to have any online presence, a website or a facebook page, google+ or a twitter account.  But with growing consumer demand all traditional small businesses including coffee shops, hair dressers or accountants need to have decent presence on these channels. If the business is not presented well in the online market it is losing potential customers.

We take our own example - we hear about a good restaurant and the first thing we do we hit Google and see what comes up, we look at the location, menu choice, prices and most importantly reviews and ratings by other customers.

This shows that a small business with an online presence needs to make it a common practise to maintain their reputation, it is similar to a big sign board in front of the shop, if not present customers will walk right past and will not know about the business.

The question is what are the simple things we can do to improve our presence online? The following few tips are not a complete marketing strategy but will be a good start:

1)      Google places

The first thing one should consider is to register your business location with Google places. This will help customers find the business location on Google maps.

 

2)      Social Media

If you haven’t already done it, you should consider creating all popular media accounts like facebook, google+, twitter and Linked in and create a page for your business, it is free and very easy to set up.

3)      Back links

If you have a website consider adding a blog section and post a blog at least once a week about a topic that interest your customers and copy that link to your all social media accounts.  Alternatively you can post it on your facebook page or Linked in page and tweet about it.

Most importantly, increase your social and professional network, your facebook friends, Linked in contacts and tweet followers.

YZM Technologies is a Perth based software company specialising in building custom software, databases and mobile apps and helping small businesses achieve better results by optimising business processes.

Should I Use CRM for my business? – Absolutely

For all small business owners who love their Excel work book and use it for everything from maintaining the customer information, contact details, accounts, inventories, quotes and follow-ups it probably sounds a little strange that Excel is actually not the right tool for it.

Imagine you need to run an advertising campaign and you want to send out a newsletter to all your customers. You can do it via your Outlook and use mail merge but what about if you want to know whether or not your customers opened your email? And clicked on a link provided in your newsletter? Also more importantly if someone wants to opt out from your email marketing campaign?

This is where a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system comes in handy, if configured correctly it will automate most of the tedious and time consuming tasks and better still it will give you insight into your marketing campaign.

In addition to that CRM manages your leads, contacts, activities, follow ups and acts as a single source of truth when it comes to customer management. Once you link your emails to your CRM it will automatically record all correspondence between you and your customer, this means you don’t need to make folders in Outlook to keep track of correspondence.

What about cost? Well, with the recent adoption of Cloud based solutions we have a great choice and the flexibility to find a solution that best meets our needs. Starting from just $12/month Zoho CRM and CapsuleCRM are the best options for any small business owner. If you want advanced functionality and automisation then Microsoft Dynamics for $65/month might be worth a look.

If your business requires integration with an existing system or custom workflow that is not supported by CRM, we will be happy to help you. At YZM Technologies we build custom software, web applications, mobile apps and we develop custom integrators.