Marketing

What Chloe does NOT know about marketing is hurting her business

Meet Chloe. She knows a few things.

Chloe is the owner and operator of an established local coffee shop and is known throughout the community for exceptional coffee and even better customer service. Chloe is a real people person — it’s what keeps her customers coming back and bringing their friends. Her love for people also inspired her decision to only sell fair-trade coffee and she donates a generous percentage of her earnings to empowering women entrepreneurs in third world countries. She has even been on a few vision trips to meet with local growers in Central and South America and knows the farmers who grow the beans she proudly serves her customers back in small town USA.

Chloe knows about coffee.

She started roasting fresh beans in a whirly pop back in college. She needed the caffeine to power through graduating from UVA with a BA and MBA in 5 years. Uninterested in corporate conglomerates, Chloe decided to take a chance and open her own small shop, selling beans she roasted herself, and creating an environment where customers are welcome to linger, dream and leave refreshed — albeit a bit caffeinated.

Chloe knows about business.

She has a successful local coffee shop that she owns and operates herself, not to mention that UVA MBA. But Chloe wants to do more. She has a dream to raise awareness about issues surrounding fair trade and wants her business to do good and improve the lives of the men and women who farm the beans she grinds and sells. So Chloe started a blog. She recognized the influence she has in the community and thought “what if I could expand my influence beyond the walls of my shop?” She is hoping that she can leverage her website and blog to make a larger impact on the fair trade movement and help more growers and producers have a fair wage to provide for their families.

However, what Chloe does NOT know is what is standing between her website and the people she wants to engage: search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is a mystery to Chloe and others just like her. Online experts (like our SEO experts at Cross and Crown) spend significant time researching, testing and monitoring the various aspects of SEO and work to ensure that the keywords that matter to the websites they support are returning on the front pages of search engines — primarily Google — with the largest search engine market share, averaging 74.54% in 2017.

What makes this mysterious (and difficult to keep up with) is that Google is constantly releasing updates to the algorithms that decide which websites come up first in a search. In fact, the folks who monitor this kind of thing estimate that Google releases over 500 algorithm changes a year.

Do you think that Chloe can keep track of over 500 algorithm changes a year?  

This is why many businesses opt  to invest in hiring firms that specialize in SEO — there are many to choose from, including Cross and Crown. There is also peace of mind in knowing that a team of experts is on your side doing everything they can to keep tabs on the ever-changing algorithm landscape and ensure that your website contains the proper data to be considered relevant enough to appear on page one of the results.

That said, some businesses opt out of SEO and head straight for paid advertising. Google AdWords for example can seem like an easier, more immediate way to end up on page one without having to invest the time it takes to do the fancy footwork of SEO. But even that choice has its flaws outside of a strategic marketing strategy that includes projected outcomes and ROIs of the money spent on pay-per-click.

All these backend stats and facts begin to leave business owners like our friend Chloe scratching their heads in confusion and brewing another cup of fair-trade organic coffee just to make sense of it all.

Here’s the thing. Cross and Crown cares about people and we know a lot of business owners feel just like Chloe. Maybe you are Chloe. You want to run an excellent business, provide stellar customer service, and raise awareness and give back to the causes you care about the most but when you find yourself navigating the complexities of Google algorithms you feel lost.

So we put our heads together and came up with a solution.

If your business isn’t ready to hire out help navigating the labyrinth of black hat, backlinks, anchor text and keyword density, we welcome you to download our FREE SEO field guide: The Business Owner’s Guide To SEO.

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Our SEO field guide was designed with business owners like you in mind and covers the basics like why SEO matters, how to write SEO-friendly content, and how your brand plays into it all; and tips on leveraging social media and other relationship building strategies to get the most out of your search engine optimization without breaking the bank — because it’s free! The SEO field guide also includes 5 brief SEO Lab exercises to help you and/or your team put teeth to the concepts and ideas we present in the content.

Truly, there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to page ranking but there are some evergreen best practices that don’t seem to be changing that you can begin implementing today that should improve your rankings and get you more traffic.

And as always, if we can help you beyond this free SEO field guide, please give us a call and we can get started on an SEO strategy today!