Every day small businesses struggle to compete online and every day that struggle gets harder and more complicated. Partially because companies like Google are tying to make it harder on web spammers and partially because small, local businesses are running up against competition from big business. Small businesses often just don’t have the time or resources that big business has to promote themselves online, posting to their blog weekly, checking the competition’s website, checking their search rankings and analytics, posting to social media sites every day, sending out email newsletters, refreshing the content of their websites every month, redesigning every couple of years, etc, etc.
This issue was address by Google’s own Matt Cutts recently in a video post where he answers the following question
“Ranking being so valuable, how does a true biz owner that offers a legitimate business and has a vast number of customers supposed to gain the traffic “deserved” over those that specialize in creating traffic? Is it supposed to be this hard for us?”
Matt’s primary advice to website owners trying to compete online was
- Make sure your website doesn’t suck
- Make your website easy for mobile users to use
- Have good navigation
At iLab New Media we are living this advice, we guarantee that any website we create will not suck, our mobile sites are fantastic examples of mobile ease of use and we always ensure that all sites we create have good, clear, easy to use navigation. So take Google’s advice now and contact iLab about working on your website so we can make sure it doesn’t suck.
Below is the full video if you are interested in watching it.
What advice would you give a small business to compete with the big boys online? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.