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Now that the election is over, we have to start looking at what we can predict is going to happen as far as taxes, Cap&Trade, the Health Care Reform Bill and other aspects of our economy that have plagued business owners, and potentially, how the Web can help you stave off some of those expenses.

Two things seem to have happened with the unemployment rate in this country. The first thing is the years long, some 99+ months of unemployment payouts that have created a culture of people unwilling to work as long as they can rely on the government to pay their bills. The second thing that has happened is a fear, a worry by business owners as the new taxes loom in the near future. The end of the Bush tax cuts, the Health Care Reform Bill, and the potential (hopefully this worry is now null and void) of the Cap & Trade Bill. These new taxes are creating a train of thought among business owners who have no real idea what it is going to cost to hire someone. How much will it cost to provide a full time employee with health insurance? How much more in taxes will I have to pay if I grow my business and get hit with the end of the Bush tax cuts?

This might lead you to think that the safest bet is to play it slow and easy for a while, until you see how it all shakes out. But, you still have a need for skills, labor, whatever. So where are you going to turn? Freelance? Part time help? Overtime for current employees? Outsourcing jobs you used to handle in house? All of these are viable options, though I hate to be the one to encourage people not to hire. I tend to be optimistic and think it will all work out in the end, TKG has been hiring for over a year now, and I do think that the economy is making a slow turn-around. I really can’t say that I believe that will continue if some of the political atmosphere doesn’t change, but we have to go with what we know for now.

So, what can the Web do to help you fill in the holes in your workforce?
1. Utilize sites that provide legal forms, business administration forms and schedules, and just about any other paperwork you need to do.
www.lectlaw.com/formb.htm
http://www.entrepreneur.com/formnet/index.html
2. Use Freelance sites to help you find the temporary or long term extra help you need.
www.freelancer.com/
www.freelanceswitch.com/
3. Use LinkedIn.com, job sites and Craigslist.com to find employees who might be willing to work part time until the economy becomes more secure and hiring becomes an options.
4. Outsource jobs that you might normally have handled in house, if there were someone around to do the work. You can have many jobs outsourced – I know that The Workshops in our area even takes small assembly jobs, packing and sorting, it’s worth checking into if you would prefer to wait to hire.
5. You had to know I was gonna get to this – the plug for TKG, but hey, it’s valid! Have a Web firm do some SEO, search marketing and social media marketing for you. We do copy, too. Not only will it save your marketing budget, but we might be able to help you squeeze through a time constraint or deadline when you really don’t have the resources available. Freeing up your in house marketing folks to concentrate on traditional marketing, or if you are a smaller biz, your assistant, to work on some of your more niche jobs might make your life a little easier and your business run a little smoother.

As for me, quite frankly, I am grateful for the way things turned out last Tuesday. I really hope this is the beginning of a turn away from so much government spending, enormous tax increases and a slippery slide into socialism. I hope that this resistance to hiring doesn’t last long, and that we all start to feel like we can relax, have faith in our economy and capitalism. To move forward we need to grow, hire, spend, and hopefully, not have all of our efforts go to China’s the government’s coffers.

A few years back the coolest thing about the Web was that anyone, anywhere could purchase products from anyplace in the world, and have that product in a few short days. SEO was all about making sure that those customers found what you had to offer, no matter where in the world they were. It was very cool (still is very cool), very fresh. Ebay was king! Now, the coolest thing about the Web is that you can Google for the closest ice cream shop open past midnight on a Tuesday and get directions to take you right to the doorstep. Now the shop around the corner, where you can have “it” now! is king. Local Search is here folks, and it’s not going anyway anytime soon – awesome!

If you read this blog, or any other on search engine marketing, you know that local search is big. Local search has been talked about for a long time, and even implemented to a certain extent, but recent improvements in mobile technology have really made it relevant. So many different aspects of mobile web and regular usage of the web are driving this trend. Google Maps and Places, Facebook Places, mobile networks, just to take off the tip of the ice burg. Because of this, the already very important aspects of local search have come to light in a way that has most people in the search industry standing up and paying attention. Google and Bing have both included location into their rankings algorithms.

I know that I usually shoot down whatever people are saying is the next big thing in search, but not when it is just common sense. (Which is really all SEO and SEM really are.) It just makes sense that search would turn local. Anytime you search for anything you need locally, a doctor, dentist, garbage company, tree trimmer or Chinese take-out, the locality is of utmost importance. Therefore, anything YOU sell, make or do for your area must be represented on your site as a local product or service. These things need to be optimized with your locality. You need to be using all the tools in your arsenal to make sure your business is easily located and your customers know what you have available. Social media, mobile networks, downloadable discounts, all these things play into how your customers find you, buy what you have or do, and how you will be ranked or reviewed, and believe me, you will be, especially if the customer is not satisfied. Never before in history has the slogan “the customer is always right” been so relevant. If they are not happy, they will take to Twitter, Facebook, and the like and tell all their friends and followers about their experience. Unfortunately, you probably have to go above and beyond to get a whole lot out of people on the positive end without pursuing a “like” or review yourself.

In the end of all of this, this new and exciting world is getting smaller by the day. Localized search is making it possible for someone to find you, Google you for directions and arrive at your place of business in a matter of minutes. If you want to be the business they find, you had better make sure you have all of your marketing ducks in a row. Shoot us an email if you need a hand with that, we’d be happy to help you out.

For those of you who just have to know more:
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/10/21/using-social-and-local-search-for-your-business
http://searchenginewatch.com/3641506

While I’m not one to clip coupons, just hasn’t been something I’ve ever done, I do like a discount; offering them as marketing tools, and using them, too. Our world is becoming increasingly mobile, with an application for everything from scanning checks directly into your account to letting people know where you are at all times with different location apps.

How about mobile coupons? Coupons downloaded onto your iPhone or Blackberry or Android or whatever device you have. There are plenty of apps such as Mobile Coupons or Yowza , that allow you to register your business and upload coupons but I think we’ve come to an all new level of advertising when you can pull into a place, your device recognizes where you are and automatically searches for coupons in the area.

Even better, location based coupons that are automatically downloaded onto your device when you arrive at a location that supports the service. Pretty awesome.

How do you, as a business owner utilize these services? I think part of being one of the “it” places in your area might include easily downloadable coupons. Someone arrives at your shop, and there ya go, a coupon. Coupons and discounts often entice people to spend money they weren’t planning on spending. It’s too hard to resist. “Saving” is big – even if it means spending to do so. So, take advantage of one or several of the services that provide downloadable coupons. They are a great little addition to all this mobile location app stuff. Are they the thing that is going to be the next big thing? Probably not, but they might boost your sales a bit, maybe even a big bit – and that’s a good thing. I do think that local search will benefit from the coupon apps, and mean that more users will be searching for a deal online, en route (hopefully not while driving). If it were me, and I had to decide between lunch destination A, with no coupon, and lunch destination B, with a coupon, I’ll probably go with B, because it’s effortless (or nearly) and who doesn’t like to save money?

Are you using the coupon apps? How are they workin’ for ya? If you do print coupons as well, I’d be interested to hear which type you get more of…

When it comes to the web, there are always new terms being tossed around. A fairly interesting one I have come across several times that seems rather pertinent to the discussion of SEO/SEM and all things social is something called a “Digital Sociologist”. What is a digital sociologist, you ask? Great question – one I would like answered myself.

A digital sociologist is a person who studies the behavior of people when using digital technology, with it’s main focus on social media usage. This new study of people will probably remind you of the discussion we have had here many times on the topic of tribalization. Tribalization, if you recall, is the phenomena of people banding together on the web around a particular blogger, forum, brand, idea, belief, or what have you. Part of digital sociology would be to study this phenomena, and perhaps figure out how to make it work for your brand.

So many things are happening on the web. It’s only natural that some formal study of the behavior of people on the web take place. We (and most SEOs) have been doing it for years in the form of analytics. But, analytics alone can only tell us so much. They tell us what channel a user comes from, what pages they visited, what they bought, or where they spent most of their time on a particular site. From these analytics we can make educated guesses to help us tweak our strategies, but taking all of this a step further, to actually understand the feeling and beliefs of the user may help define a strategy to a greater extent. For some, it will help define why people behave they do about a particular blogger, brand, belief, etc.

Below is a very brief presentation on Digital Sociology by Ali Hadi. I would like to take the discussion much deeper, as I think this will ultimately have an impact on the way we do our jobs, especially as they pertain to social media and SEO/SEM.

Small businesses have a great opportunity with social media. It presents a “word of mouth” type of advertising that is sadly lacking in traditional marketing. People, oddly enough, are now looking to the web, and the people they ‘meet’ there, to help them make sound decisions on many major issues, including just about any purchase you can imagine. Brian Solis has an interesting article about small business utilizing digital sociology and social media if you’d like to read further and join the discussion.

I have been a long time believer and promoter of the The Longtail. What is The Longtail, you ask? Hopefully, if you are client, you already know the answer. Or better yet, you’ve just handed the whole ball of wax to Jen and the SEO department and told them to go crazy, so you don’t need to know about The Longtail.

The term “longtail” refers to a key phrase that uses more words to get a more specific and accurate search result. For example, if you went to your favorite search engine and typed in “grill”, you would get results showing anything from an actual barbeque grill manufacturer (kudos to Weber {who else?} for ranking 1st in Google for the term!), to a rapper with gold stuff glued to his teeth.

Now, if you were to search the term “gas grill” or “charcoal grill” you are much more likely to find what you need. So, let’s take it a step further, and search the longtail phrase “stainless steel gas grill”. You have now narrowed the results considerably and will most likely find precisely what you would like to purchase.

Turn that around and take a look at it from an E-commerce standpoint. Optimizing your product pages with the longtail can increase conversions if you are very careful to choose the correct phrase, and concentrate most of the optimization on this phrase. If you stuff your page with lots of other phrases, then you dilute the power of the longtail.href=”http://www.theseoblog.org”>TKG’s SEO blog had a great idea for incorporating longtail phrases into your site a couple of months or so ago. Be sure to check it out!

Dave Davies over at WebProNews has some great pointers for The Longtail. He has another great analogy that really works when applying your strategy to an e-commerce site. Made me want to go buy a new TV, though.

If you’re still confused as to what the ‘longtail’ is, or how to develop these phrases and optimize for them, this video: How to Rank on Google for Longtail Phrases was posted on April 21, 2010, has great info and is pretty detailed.

If you’re still having trouble, give us a call, we’d love to help you out!