ebusiness club

New trends in Google, web search and social media

Yesterday I attended the Ebusiness Club conference in Nottingham, an excellent series of training events in the East Midlands which are always widely popular (500+ filled the house today) and delivered by top-notch expert trainers. These events are exactly the sort of things the public sector should support as they build capacity and skills in businesses to stay competitive in the digital space. Most digital training programmes tend to be for big FMCG brands, corporates or the public sector so the Ebusiness Club approach for small businesses is always really valuable and refreshing.

Today’s trainers were Ian Lockwood – a charismatic uber-nerd of tech search – and Susan Hallam, the first lady of web marketing, discussing social media trends for small businesses. A few highlights from their presentations which are relevant to those creating a digital strategy and publishing compelling digital content:

Trends in search and Google

Google Caffeine is the new version of Google, rolling out in January 2010 after the Christmas e-sales run. No major shake-up of search engine optimisation is needed, but the new engine will include greater emphasis on results of domain authority (meaning your site is even more likely to rank below results from national/international names like Wikipedia and BBC), web loading speed is viewed as important (aim for a load speed of 2-3 seconds, you can test your site’s speed here) and, most significantly, real-time search of social media will show in search results. This means that having a strong social media presence, blogging and ensuring people are talking about your site in social media channels will become increasingly important.

Bing will become an important player in search when its buy-out of Yahoo! search is complete, then having a 7% market share which is likely to grow. Fortuitously, the rules of optimisation for Bing are much the same as Google, also favouring fast-loading smaller (under 150kb) pages and links from authoratitive sites.

More worrying, Google are developing new ways of embedding itself in the conversion stream – with more pages, more ads and more inventory spaces for their adverts between the searcher and the search results, with solutions like similar search phrases. Google’s “less than free” model seeks to eradicate the competition, like their free satnav technology with embedded adverts which are seriously disrupting the steady-state business of TomTom and Garmin.

Trends in social media

Too many small businesses have jumped into social media with two feet and created a messy splash: it’s time to step back and look at your strategy for how and why you engage with others in social media to increase conversion. Twitter needs a clear approach: make tweets which signal you as an expert, make an announcement, or signpost to other sources. Set up a programme of tweets about offers, announcements, new products or expertise.

The top four most re-tweeted subjects are:
1. Asking questions (you may get plenty of answers!)
2. Tips and tricks
3. Humourous or funny (use with caution)
4. Breaking news

Facebook ads also may be a valuable tools for specialist and local businesses: unlike Google pay-per-click which focuses on the search term not the user, Facebook ads allow you to display your adverts to users from specific areas, with specific demographics or with specific interests in their profiles (which explains why all I see is adverts for cat products, despite not having a cat).

Susan also advises having a seperate business account and personal account on Facebook, and using administrator business profiles to create groups and pages for businesses, not employees or individual’s personal profiles. Her top tip for small businesses operating in the social media spaces is to get blogging: it’s free, it builds credibility and an audience and all that fresh new content is great for search engines too.

Great to meet so many local business folks at the event fired up to do more with their online marketing and social media. There were lots of people tweeting too, which doesn’t often happen at events in Nottingham – I think we’re turning a corner here.

If you’re a Midlands business and are looking to develop a digital strategy, have a look at my current programme of support as you may qualify for up to £1,000 of grant funding from Business Link (woo!).

And a final plug…if you’re a business based in Notts doing anything creative/digital related, please send your stories for us to publish over at Creative Nottingham.

How can the small business learn to trust digital providers?

Ebusiness club

I went to an excellent breakfast briefing workshop yesterday in Nottingham which was part the Ebusiness Club events. Converting Website Visitors was expertly presented by Ian Lockwood who gave us an action-packed romp in 90 minutes through techniques to measure your web traffic (including some nifty tricks on A-B and other types of testing in Google Analytics) and using strong techniques of copywriting, sales offers and content strategies to upsell your casual browsers to paying e-customers.

Ian recommends to test and test again – you need to know your benchmark to know how you’re succeeding, make big bold changes and be prepared to go with the results – what works for you may not work for your customers. The quality of ideas and information definitely made it worth the early start, when I’m not usually much of an early riser

The event was packed out with 150 local professionals, some digital specialists like myself and Susan Hallam looking to qualify or augment our knowledge, mainly other small business owners keen to get ahead in all things digital.

I had an intriguing conversation with a lady who ran a social health sector consultancy. She said she spent twelve days last year in Ebusiness Club and other web training events. I asked if she was trading online, “No, I do all this blogging and other stuff but it has no benefit – I get all my work from professional bodies and word of mouth.”

She said she wanted to know about web so she could manage her own website development and understand how to contract services like designers, developers and copywriters to do it the right way because she couldn’t trust those she had worked with to do things correctly, and without knowing the knowledge on best practice she couldn’t be sure she was getting the standard of work she needed. “In my industry I have to be accredited and achieve specific qualifications and standards. In the web industry, there are no standards.”

Web specialists – the 21st century used car salesmen?

Initially this conversation perplexed me. Why spend so much time at your expense on something so peripheral to your business when there are affordable professionals out there like myself who can do it for you? Or indeed, why have a website if it causes such a headache?

It strikes me as a control thing – small business owners often want to be in charge of and understand every aspect of their business – and in theory so they should, but as she noted, she would trust an accountant with her finances as that’s what they are trained and accredited to do.

Yet her viewpoint also alluded to some shockingly low standards from the “web shops” (i.e. sole and small business web designers) in Nottingham out there which harken back to the ‘bad ol days’ of pretty, non-functional, non-editable designs which were commonplace when I started in the industry in 2000. Yet small businesses cannot afford the many specialist or bigger digital or full-service agencies that do provide quality work in the city.

What’s the solution? A serious professional body for digital professional with high, univeral membership standards? Unlikely to have much impact or change hearts and minds unless it was nationally established. How do we as digital professionals build trust whilst empowering our clients with knowledge they can take away and learn from?

Are we in danger of becoming the user car salesmen of the 21st century?

How can we develop an effective and trusted digital consultancy service?

I’ve no instant solutions. But this does pose a major challenge for me; I’m currently developing a product-based service for small business to empower business owners with the solutions they need to grow their business online. As a non-designer, non-programmer, non-SEO specialist, I’ve no vested interest in commissioning an expensive website that little meets the business’s needs, as an agency or web shop may. (Why pay when Wordpress or Yahoo! Stores will solve over 50% of business’s needs affordably?)

Yet the challenge to date, and it’s changed only incrementally since I first dipped my toe in this type of consulting in 2003, is that small business’s are still only inclined to pay for ’stuff’ (like a shiny new website or brochure) rather than time and money saving advice, and those most in need of help probably don’t yet realise they have a problem. They’re probably not even online yet, or don’t realise how under-performing their website – let alone their total digital presence – is.

One man at the event said “it’s all very good advice, but I don’t have time to do all of this.”

And that’s where a digital consultancy can come in – to give you the skills and roadmap as to where you need to go, so like our social health specialist you know how to ask the right questions and get the right results when you are ready to commission external services, or work with your digital consultant to get the results you deserve. And give yourself a 12-day shortcut

I’m looking for guinea pigs to test my new business digital consultancy package which I will launch in the spring, if you’re interested in trying it out please drop me a line, email susi@digitalconsultant.co.uk, tel: 07981 222799. I’ll be doing one consultancy for free and three others at a nominal cost with business who can give me some feedback to get the formula of services right.

And if you’re an independent web designer or developer, particularly if you’re based in or near Nottingham, I’d love to hear from you to see if we can work together to create better quality services.