The #1 Impediment to Getting Your Business off the Ground

The issue every small business faces is this: How to get Google's attention. in order to drive website traffic and ultimately sales (nearly all very small businesses need a hand up from Google). There is so much advice and 95% of it is either flat out wrong or impractical.

The #1 impediment to getting your business off the ground is website traffic. The #1 impediment to increasing your website traffic is your site's Domain/Site Authority rank. The degree of your website's importance can be estimated by using rank check tools like those offered by Moz and Semrush. These are just estimates, but they are as close as you will ever get to knowing how Google ranks your site. If it's below 10, you are toiling in the darkness.

The traditional method for getting Google to notice your site is to create more content, generate more webpages and blog posts. In reality, as long as your site rank is low, Google won't care how much content is on your site. In fact, even buying Google Ads won't help much--you may not know that the primary determining factor for how often your ads appear is your site score (not how much you bid). It's a Catch 22 and it can be VERY frustrating.

No one has come up with a practical way for very small businesses to improve their site rank until recently. It's pretty simple, the more backlinks the more importance Google assigns to your site. Actually getting more backlinks is another matter.

There so much advice on how to get more backlinks--i.e. sending random emails to select sites and asking them to add a link to your website. I don't know who this works for--who is going to add a link to their website for a business they have never heard of... There are also companies that will write content for blogs that includes links to customer sites. This does work, but it's very slow (months/years not days), expensive and generates relatively few backlinks.

Another option that no developer would ever recommend is buying backlinks. You can do it, but there is a serious risk of a Google penalty and/or infecting your site with a virus.

Much of the advice I provide in this blog I've learned firsthand by experimenting with my own business (I have a very small business, too). Like you, I have wasted a lot of time and effort chasing after the next big marketing tool that promises amazing results and the issue of site rank and backlinks has been particularly vexing.

The end result is almost always the same: initial excitement, free trail, actually using the tool, thinking I'm not using it correctly, connecting with a rep for help, and then realizing: Yes, I am using it correctly, but it just doesn't deliver the results I'd hoped for. Although there have been exceptions.

By experimenting, I have developed a relatively safe, inexpensive way to get more backlinks to my site in order to improve my site rank. It actually works. In three months my site rank has more than doubled--so that I am now neck-in-neck with a competitor I once thought was out of reach. More importantly, the traffic to my website has been growing steadily since. Low site rank, low traffic and stagnant sales are issues I no longer have. Thanks Google!

For a no cost discussion of your situation and how we can leverage metrics-based marketing to grow your business call 630-363-8081 or email jeanna@smartprcommunications.com. Find out more about our Core Marketing Solution for Very Small Businesses.