Enemy of the state is now 16 years old! This film has a line in it that should be a great inspiration to small business owners. "Well, if they're big and you're small, then you're mobile and they're slow. You're hidden and they're exposed. You only fight battles you know you can win. That's the way the Vietcong did it. You capture their weapons and you use them against them the next time." When you think about it, this is great advice and can be applied to business! Most large businesses are full of red tape and politics. Small business have an advantage in that they can change direction and meet the market needs much quicker.
Running a small business is a huge juggling act. Many small business owners envy their big rivals for lots of reasons and the biggest reason is generally resources. They generally appear to have lots of staff, huge marketing budgets etc. However how many times have you called a big business and no one has answered the phone? How many times have you left a message and never had a call back? When large businesses employ a lot of people in defined roles they may have two or three reception staff for example answering all the calls. This is great until someone is off sick or on holiday. When the reception teams do not answer the phones, because the calls are stacked up, the system generally bounces the calls into the main offices for the staff to pick up. At this point most of the professionalism is lost. The call is already at 5-6 rings before it bounces to the next person and the person answering the call in the office is annoyed at the phone because it is disturbing them from doing their role within the business.
Call answering companies are a fantastic solution to this problem for small business owners. A team of professional call handlers will answer your calls for you in your business name. They will answer the call in a polite and professional way and capture all the information you require. They can also help you filter your calls so that only your customers can get through to you. Time is money as they say!
Google Pay Per Click Missing calls costs you ££££'s. Every local business owner knows that they have to be visible on Google search to achieve the best returns for the business. There are only two ways to achieve this:
Natural Search. This achieved by a lot of hard work and it is worth while employing a Good SEO company to do this for you. There are lots of things that you can do yourself to improve your performance within the rankings. Here are a few basic tips:
Google Places This takes around 30 minutes to complete and you will need a Google Account -http://www.google.co.uk/business/placesforbusiness/. Make sure that you include good, high quality images (up to 10) and a thorough description of your business.
Duplicate Content Do not take content from any other site including any that you own yourself. Why would Google show your site to its users if there is nothing original worth seeing on it?
Quality Content Make sure that you have someone proof read your content. There is nothing worse than spelling and grammatical errors. Google will reward you for good quality content.
User Friendly This is important for Google and users. You may have seen competitors stuff 300 keywords into the footer but ask yourself does this have a benefit to the end user? If the answer is no then don't do it!
Server Speed If you are working with tight budgets it can be tempting to cut back on server costs. This is a bad idea! It is true you get what you pay for and servers are no different. No one wants to go to a site that takes ages to load or is constantly down due to server failures.
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