The most difficult part of starting my business was finding businesses who were visionaries. Finding businesses who understood the opportunities that were sprouting before our eyes. Finding businesses who believed enough in the online environment and social media, and the reality that this new “fad” was going to change the way they did business forever. In a great way! Businesses who believed that social media for rural business was a game changer, just as I did.

Four years ago, in rural and regional Australia, and unfortunately, I must say, even today, there has been a super slow uptake of internet technologies that can assist businesses grow.

Rural Business is Beginning to Embrace Social Media

A lot of changes have occured in the last 4 years. Changes to the way consumers think, feel and react to marketing. Changes to purchasing behaviours, resistance against major corporations and a thirst and hunger for knowledge, information and shared stories between consumers, businesses and industry.

In short, consumers want to be informed, educated and to be part of the conversation. Consumers no longer want to be drip fed information at the mercy of marketing departments of multinationals.

It’s these very changes that have seen a huge increase in the rise of rural and regional business opportunities, an increase in the exposure for small business, and even a booming growth in markets such as handmade goods.

For those businesses who were early adopters, this means they’ve been on the receiving end of a welcome army of consumers wanting to hear their stories. For those who are just initiating social media or online marketing, they can learn from the failures and successes of those that dared tread first, and can make everything they can of the opportunities of more established social networks. There’s still also plenty of opportunity to an early adopter in the newest social media opportunities presenting themselves continually.

 Rural Business Must be Online, But First Impressions Count!

There’s so much talk about the need to be online, the need to be on social media, creating Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, YouTube videos and blogs, along with a slather of other “necessities” that it’s important to remember rushing in can cause problems. The internet doesn’t forget. Barging in without understanding possible outcomes can cause more harm than good for your business. EVERY business needs to be online, it’s just a matter of understanding the BEST way to be online, not just being online for the sake of it, or even worse, to the detriment of all your hard work.

Any business launching into social media and online marketing MUST understand some simple rules:

1. What are you trying to achieve online?

2. Who are you trying to communicated with online?

3. Where are your target market “hanging out” online?

4. What online strategies will get you in front of them?

5. How will you measure your achievements online?

The most IMPORTANT THING: Do NOT start accounts online just because everyone says to. You need to know where you’re going first, then take it one step at a time to get there.

Without a doubt some of the biggest growth opportunities presenting themselves in rural and regional Australia today are well aligned with the advantages of the online environment offers.

It’s an exciting time, and a time that keeps me pushing forward to help regional business to make the most of the amazing opportunities that are in front of them right now. Each time a client learns how to improve their online presence, connect with their customers or achieve goals they’d never thought possible, I get to be there to enjoy that with them, that makes me proud to do what I do, and even more proud to be taking rural and regional businesses to the rest of the country, and the world!

As a business owner, I understand how important it is for prospective customers to be able to find relevant information online, hopefully via my website. But beyond that, I truly want to offer useful information that helps people in their business, whether they are a client or not. In order to reach the largest amount of people, it’s important therefore that I understand what Google expects from professional website owners. This is especially true in my role as SEO Consultant!

Providing high quality information is something we’ve known Google gives huge preference to for a long time. It’s great to see there are some changes coming through that will help those who truly care about providing great, fresh content be found by the people who are searching for them online.

Changes Google has or will be implementing for SEO:

This information is available in full from the Google Search Blog:

• Smoother ranking changes for fresh results. [launch codename "sep", project codename "Freshness"] We want to help you find the freshest results, particularly for searches with important new web content, such as breaking news topics. We try to promote content that appears to be fresh. This change applies a more granular classifier, leading to more nuanced changes in ranking based on freshness.
• Improvement in a freshness signal. [launch codename "citron", project codename "Freshness"] This change is a minor improvement to one of the freshness signals which helps to better identify fresh documents.
• No freshness boost for low-quality content. [launch codename “NoRot”, project codename “Freshness”] We have modified a classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude fresh content identified as particularly low-quality.
• Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. [project codename "Spam"] We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.

What do these changes mean for your business?

If you’re providing great, fresh information on your website, then the good news is that you should just keep doing so! If you’re not quite sure then we can take a look for you and see what can be improved to ensure your website has the best chance at being seen by your targeted audience.

Having a blog as well as a website (or combining the two) definitely helps businesses to provide fresh, relevant information that is firstly great for readers, and secondly helps improve your relevance in the Search engines.

In this case, I’m really please to welcome All Time Towing to the Bright Biz family. Ash runs this Port Macquarie Towing company offering 24 hour emergency towing from Coffs Harbour to Taree.

The Problem:

When I first spoke to Ash, All Time Towing had no online presence, no website and wasn’t showing in search engine rankings at all. This meant business was slow, or non existent. The nature of breakdowns and towing meant that often prospective customers were searching via mobile devices and search rankings were very necessary so potential customers could locate the business at their time of need. Other services such as long distance freight and beach recovery were necessary to highlight also.

The Solution:

A simple, yet effective website was created to highlight the reliable towing services that All Time Towing offer. Specific attention was paid to developing niche pages for each geographical area that All Time Towing covers, along with carefully selected online copywriting to ensure that search engine rankings were achieved quickly and easily. Once the website was live, it was only a matter of days before Ash began receiving calls from customers who had found him online.

An overwhelming success!

Are Social Media and SEO Linked?

Taking a first look at the most essential SEO component of social media: social media builds links. In fact , if you can create viral content and are lucky to strike it rich with a successful viral campaign, it replicates an SEO link building campaign. The large number of backlinks create authority and legitimacy, proving your expertise.

If a website is getting it’s content shared thousands of timea across social media, it sends some positive signals and information about your internet site to search engines:

1. Your website contains current information

2. Your website is current, not an old site floating around the internet

3. Your website understands the needs and wants of your audience.

Search engines are interested in one thing: helping users find the best content that covers what they are looking for. Large amounts of social shares indicate that a large amount of people not only found what they were attempting to find on your website, but were also so impressed by the information on your site that they chose to share it with others.

Viral Content = Valuable Content that people consider useful and good enough to share with those they know.

By gaining a big amount of social shares, you’re not just boosting your SEO signals—you’re also creating content with worth for your base of clients. Viral content is a win-win for both your brand and your search engine rankings. Like everything else in life , however , price requires time and talent to create.

Viral content is quality content. It’s important to ensure that it’s well-crafted, it’s information, useful, or it’s funny. If you need the thousands of shares, you are going to have to put thought, skill, and effort into creating something with real value for your clients, customers and audience.

If you’re looking for a Port Macquarie SEO Consultant or for that matter if you’re based anywhere in Australia we’d love to talk with you about adding you to the Bright Biz family of customers.

While most other websites talk about travelling with children internationally, Little Aussie Travellers celebrates the amazing regions around Australia, and helps you research how best to explore the Australian country as a family. Offering great tips on how to travel with children, camping recipes for families, family travel on a budget, how to choose the right travel gear for families, how to choose the best 4wd for Australian travel, and a whole range of travel resources.

Not only that, there’s some great blogging and other stories too.

So if you’ve ever wondered if it’s possible to just pack up your life, sell all your “stuff” and live on the road to really “smell the roses” then follow this great website and watch as stories of past travel are shared, and stories of research and planning for around australia travel unfold.

TOOL 1 – Google Analytics.

For most website owners they don’t ever really understand the value of their site, or how effective it is at attracting and retaining viewers. Do you know how many people visit your website? How they got there? How long they were on your site and how many pages they viewed? How much direct traffic vs search engine traffic you are getting? Don’t worry if you said know, there is a free tool to help you find out all this valuable information and more.

Install Google Analytics on your website by signing up and following the instructions.

TOOL 2 – Keyword Research Tool.

Once you have analytics installed, you really need to focus on what keywords you’ll be optimising your website for. The easiest way to do this is a quick brainstorming session. If you were a customer, what keywords would you type into google to find your business? Write these down. Once you have some starter keywords, head over to Google Keyword Research Tool and follow the instructions. You’ll need to type in keyword/s and google will help you come up with possible variations that will be suitable for your website. The best part is that it even provides estimated search volumes so you know how popular a keyword is. Another great piece of information here is the competitive rating that is applied to tell you how competitive certain keywords are. Just remember the traffic stats are “estimates” so take them into account but don’t always trust everything you read.

TOOL 3 – SEO For Firefox Extension.

If you’re a Firefox user (and you should be) then a great tool to install and use is the SEO Book SEO for Firefox Extension. It’s a wonderful tool which allows you to view market research information quickly and easily while you’re browsing the internet. If you’re interested in what your competitors are doing and how difficult it might be to beat them, then stop wondering and start discovering. With all these stats at your fingertips, decisions on what areas you need to compete hardest in to reach your SEO targets are much easier than they once were

While it’s not likely anybody but Google Search Engineers will ever truly know exactly why and how Google search engines choose one website over another to offer in search results, it is clear that they do provide guidelines that serve as a general rule for best practice amongst website owners.

The real achievement of a great SEO plan is the ensure that Google sees your website as the most relevant.

If you have managed to do some initial reading, then you may have come across the descriptions of “Black Hat” and “White Hat” SEO. For the average website owner, the only tactics you are likely to undertake yourself, are likely to be considered “white hat” and this is the way it should be. “Black Hat” SEO methods are developed to try to trick Google into thinking a website is more important, than it actually is. The problem with Black Hat methods is that they generally only work in the short term but Google are constantly refining and tweaking their ranking methods and will quickly penalise and ban websites who appear to gainrankings using these unsavoury techniques.

The Main Points to Consider for Great White Hat SEO Practices.

How Important Does Your Website Appear?

Google understands that people prefer to visit accurate and popular websites.  If other websites talk about your website and recommend it by linking to your website, Google sees those links as “Votes” for your website. The greater the number of links, the greater Importance your website holds. Not all links are created equal though. It’s important to keep in mind that links from spam pages can actually be negative, so only seek links from great quality webpages.

TIP: Approach suppliers or businesses you work or partner with to link to your website.

Is Your Website Trustworthy?

As previously mentioned, links from poor quality websites can actually hurt your SEO Rankings. Google will only believe your website is trustworthy if the websites who are linking to you also appear to be trustworthy.

Do not use techniques such as hiding text within your website, sneakily redirecting your page to others, buying links from link farms or any other of the blackhat techniques floating around the web. They will only ensure that the search engines actually see your site as low grade.

What Are Your Customers Searching For?

So now we know that Google needs to know that your website is important and trustworthy, but important and trustworthy for what subjects? You will need to decide what “search terms” it is that you want your website to rank for. What would your customers type into Google Search to find you? My customers might type in something such as SEO Consultant. Your customers might type in something such as Sydney Plumber if you were a plumber located in that region.

TIP: Write a list of all the likely search terms your customers will use to find your business online. It’s those keywords you will be wanting to use across your website.

Of course  having a trustworth and important website is only a basic explanation of how SEO works, but if you keep this in mind with all decisions you make relating to your website, it will be a step in the right direction.

Did you know?

90% of search engine users will click on a result in the first 3   pages of search engine rankings. What page is your business on?

Chances are, your portfolio website is based on flash and when you search for photographers in your location, your website is nowhere to be seen! If it is on the first page, then it’s not up high where most people click.

There are some simple changes you can make to your online marketing strategy to help ensure your website has a chance at ranking higher. To get started if you’re doing this yourself, the best strategy for photographers with flash based websites is to have a blog on the same domain. In many instances it is actually easier to focus Search Engine Optimising toward your blog, rather than your flash site. This may seem back to front or not ideal, but when potential customers are seeing your work that’s what matters right?

Before doing anything though, it’s important that you know and understand your keywords and your market. If your target customers were searching for you in google what would they type? Often this will be things like “your town” photographer and variations of that. The good news is that it is generally relatively easy to achieve rankings for location based keywords once you know what you’re doing.

If your website is html or just blog based, then you have a definite advantage, and achieiving high seo rankings for photographers is easier with blog and html sites, but for those with flash sites it is also achievable but just a little tougher.

Stay tuned for our guide to SEO for Photographers. We’ve got some amazing resources launching soon that could not only help you grow your business online, but save you money wasting mistakes at the same time! If that’s something of interest to you then SEO For Photographers will be essential.

As a self confessed small business in the search engine optimisation arena we love what we do. Being regional allows us to focus on small and regional businesses that might otherwise find it too overwhelming or expensive to use services such as Search Engine Optimisation or Social Media Marketing to grow their business and compete in the online playing field.

We continue to offer previous services such as writing services to write or edit websites, newsletters, articles and any other online copywriting requirements.

We also now proudly offer Online Reputation Management. ORM works to help businesses or individuals monitor what is being said about them online, or to clean up negativity that may have surfaced online. Such a fulfilling service to offer and sadly becoming more and more necessary in the harsh online environment.