For SMB owners, knowing what their real online visibility is, especially compared to their competitors, will let them know where they stand and how they can improve their online presence and reach more customers. This knowledge can help them improve their offering to existing customers and improve sales conversion rates. Understanding the online visibility of an SMB is very important for companies that sell online marketing services to SMBs. The chart below shows the online visibility figures for contractors in Georgia: Since we already collect information about the appearance of SMBs on leading search engines, IYPs, local and vertical sites, dealing with the complex merge issues described above, we decided to compile an online visibility measurement in some categories. It should also take into consideration the SMB’s own website – a roofer with a highly optimized site can still have good visibility even if he is not listed well on the leading directories. In other words, online visibility for SMBs involves a broad array of parameters, on all forms of local search sites. SMB online visibility, on top of everything else, is a relative term. For example, even if a Wyoming plumber is much less visible than your average New York lawyer, he may still rank high if he is more visible than other plumbers in Wyoming. To complicate things further, an SMB’s online visibility should not be calculated in objective terms, but rather relative to other businesses in its market and vertical. If you are a Realtor who advertises on a local directory and you appear in the first three results, you’re a lot more visible than another Realtor who has a free listing and appears on page 37. Advertising on a directory or even claiming your listing significantly improves an SMB’s visibility. For example, it would be fairly safe to assume that when a consumer searches for an attorney, she will turn to one of the vertical sites specializing in attorneys, such as or FindLaw, rather than to one of the local directories, where she would usually go to find a restaurant.įurthermore, an SMB’s online visibility is affected by the way it is listed. For SMBs, it is important to know which sites and directories are more suited for their prospective customers. However, general traffic figures are not enough. What is important is how many consumers see the SMB when searching online, or put slightly differently, how much traffic the different sites and directories have. The same SMB can also have its real phone number in its IYP listing and a tracking number on a local directory.īut online visibility is not just about being listed in many places. For instance, an SMB’s address can be “1241 Main St., LA” on a vertical site and “serving the greater LA area” on an IYP site. The main attributes that comprise the appearance of an SMB are its name, address and phone number, and these can appear differently on different sites. An SMB, on the other hand, can have various, sometimes very different, online appearances. For one thing, the way a website appears online is very conclusive: the site has an explicit, unique URL. The online visibility of an SMB is more complex. Web site visibility consists of several relatively easy to measure features such as how well the site appears in search results on search engines or how many external links lead back to the website This column will discuss the online visibility of small and medium businesses (SMBs) and why it is harder to define, identify and measure SMB presence than web site visibility. The term “online visibility” usually refers to the visibility of sites on the web.
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