6 Tips on Small Business finance

As competition between business firms is on a constant rise, it has become more and more difficult to find capital for your small business. An organization’s access to more capital is a major discerning factor that separates it from the rest. Things have changed dramatically since the 2008 Global Depression and finance to small organizations is not that readily available as it used to. Read on for 6 Tips on Small Business finance.

Hence, there are several extra milers that business owners have to do in order to secure additional finance to expand their small businesses. This becomes even more difficult due to the lack of any performance history, which doesn’t work very well in the books of investors. If you are trying to elaborate your business and need extra capital, here are some tips that might be helpful in securing finance for your organization.

1. Personal Investment is the Key

You cannot hope to risk someone else’s investment, without risking your personal capital in the business. A finance partner will not show much interest unless they make sure that you have invested a significant amount of capital in the business. Nevertheless, it is almost impossible to get debt financing for a startup unless a valuable personal asset is kept as collateral. Try to maximize the amount of personal money invested in the business to stand a better chance of approval.

2. Be Specific about the Type of Finance You’re Looking For

While most of us know it already, it is common for people to be oblivious to the different types of finance models in the market. An applicant must be clear about the type of finance they require. Whether it is working capital finance or finance to buy new equipment, business owners must have a precise idea about the purpose and the amount of capital that is required.

3. Crowdfunding

One of the most popular ways to raise small capital in a small time is through Crowdfunding. The term Crowdfunding is a way to raise money through your social contacts like family, friends and others through the internet. Although, this is more of a short-term solution to your capital needs, it can definitely work when nothing else does. Sites like Kickstarter and FundRazr etc. can be accessed by people in order to raise some short term capital for their small projects and fresh startups.

4. Microloans

Even after you have invested a significant amount of capital, there might be a chance that financers might still not provide you with the capital you need. This might be due to the lack of any credit history and any prior experience. The best way to get an easy cash advance is by applying for a microloan. This is specifically for small businesses that need some additional working capital for their day to day expenses. The minimum amount for a microloan can be as low as $500 upto $35,000. Most microloan organizations have flexible and lenient criteria and don’t require a lot of documentation.

5. Clean Credit Record

It is already clear that investing in a new business is a risky affair for most financers and you do not want to ruin your chances by having a bad credit history. Most finance companies do a thorough background check on most investors and also check their credit scores. If the investors find too many discrepancies in your credit history and a low credit score, there are slim chances that they might invest in you. Keeping a good check on your credit scores and settling all the payments that might affect your history is always a good thing before seeking an investor.

6. Long-Term Planning

While there are countless ways of securing small finance, planning for long-term business is the key to success. Investors will often look at the longevity of your business plan rather than its uniqueness. Hence, determining the amount of capital needed based on your long term plans is always the best option.

Apart from these, there are several other ways like using your credit card and applying for a bank loan to get easy finance for your small organization. Nevertheless, it is always careful planning and limiting your expenses that will help secure additional capital for your business.

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3 Golden Rules of Developing Customer Loyalty on a Tight Budget

Every company clearly benefits from customer loyalty. However, your business may not have the millions of dollars that the leaders in your industry have to put towards endless layers of advertising to attract those customers. Fortunately, there are many ways that you can develop customer loyalty on a tight budget. Here are some of the top ways.

1 – Respond more quickly to customer queries than anyone in your industry

Social media, citation aggregation software and customer management software give you the ability to access everything that your customers say about you almost in real time. Never before have businesses been blessed with the ability to not only sell across oceans, but provide customer service across those same oceans without spending a great deal of money.

Nine out of every 10 people believe that companies have a responsibility to answer queries on Facebook. However, only one in four businesses actually does this. Is it any wonder that customer loyalty has dropped in the past 20 years? Use all of the information that have on your customers to create a great customer experience for each of them. From this kind of service, your business will certainly build and maintain more customer loyalty.

2 – Get to know your best customers

The Pareto rule, or the 80/20 rule of buying and selling, says that 80 percent of your sales will come from 20 percent of your customers. These 20 percent of customers are the ones who are most likely to become loyal if given the chance. However, you should know never to take anything for granted in the modern business landscape.

In order to convert the customers who are supposed to become loyal to your company, you need a consistent and wide-open two-way line of communication. This can be created through social media very easily; however, there is another level to this endeavor. Your loyal customers deserve personalized service, and no matter how small your budget may be, you can definitely afford to give it to them. Maintaining a customer costs a business around 15 percent of what it takes to build a relationship with a brand-new customer.

Hold events and contests for your best customers. If you are having a sale, incorporate location-based technology and opt in demographic lists so that your best customers truly have the first opportunity to take you up on your offers.

3 – Create programs that naturally develop customer loyalty

The first program that you can incorporate into your business is a product that requires customer loyalty. If you constantly have iterations and improvements on your product, then people will be inclined to come back for more. This is one of the basic tenants of the automobile industry – the best brands are the ones that are always announcing new features for next year’s model. For instance, if you have a product that requires listening, incorporating closed captioning services into the product is a great way to engender customer loyalty.

Aside from having products that are consistently being improved, you can also create programs that will help to engage your customer base. For instance, getting involved in the communities of your good customers is a great way to keep them engaged with your business. This does not have to be a physical location; it can very easily be an online community as well. This is why message boards and niche forums are actually more important for a small business than the major three search engines.

If your business gets involved with a charity, this is another way to ensure that you will always have customers will rally to your cause. Even if you end up giving a great deal of money away, you must consider that you would not have brought in this money if you did not have the offer in the first place. In many cases, doing business with a charity ends up being more profitable for both ends. Never mistake the nonprofit industry for an unprofitable industry – there is definitely a great deal of money being made that you can pick up on.

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Using Social Content to Build Brand

When it comes to building brand, nothing is more effective than customer satisfaction. There was a time before the world of digital communications when it was referred to as ‘word of mouth’ advertising. This was the very best way for businesses to establish trust, an integral aspect of brand. In today’s culture, word of mouth advertising is still alive and well but has just taken on another form – social media. Now we rely on social media to spread the word about our likes and dislikes and this is why the intelligent marketing campaign will tap into the power of such networks as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as well as Google+.

Why Trust Is Important

With an ever-growing number of businesses popping up each day and the ease at which consumers can switch back and forth between one brand and another, it is imperative to build a solid relationship with our customers. Relationships are built on trust, pure and simple. If you want to build and grow a solid customer base, the first thing you should be looking to do is instill trust in your products, services and even in your own reputation as a business.

Using Social Content to Instill Trust

People are social creatures so we tend to form bonds with others of like minds. Many of us have online friends and followers to our social sites numbering in the hundreds. We share and post about literally every aspect of our lives from foods that we eat to experiences we’ve had with companies we have dealt with. When looking to instil trust in a company’s brand, it would be nice to capture all those things that are being tweeted about, and posted on, in relation to our products and services. There is actually a way to do just this.

Tools for Capturing Social Content

Just as the web crawlers make their way around the internet to find and rank content for search engines, there is now a new breed of crawlers that seek out social content. If you are trying to capture what people are saying about your products, services and even your company in general, utilising a crawler that has the ultimate goal of searching social sites is the best way to go. Not only can written content be captured but pictures and videos are sought out as well. Many products have literally gone viral due to videos posted on sites like YouTube.

Redistributing Social Content

As information is captured, social content curation pulls the best content together into one place to be redistributed. This social content is then re-published to various platforms in order to be made more visible to potential customers. It can be fed live to your website, reposted on social media hubs or even powered to big screens live, in real time, as it is hitting the Web. Never before was it so easy to capture and spread positive customer feedback which is such a vital element in building brand.

Whilst it has long been known that there is huge potential in utilising social media to build brand, it wasn’t until recently that it became possible to capture and repost all those wonderful things people are saying about our businesses. What customers say about a company is so much more effective than all the advertising we can do and why it is essential to capture and repost as much as possible. If you are not taking advantage of social content to build brand, you are missing out on one of the most effective marketing tools you could possibly use.

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5 Tips for Managing Small Business Finances

Professional financial management is essential for the success of any business that is just getting on its feet. Money matters are very crucial since the entire basis of the business is to generate an income. Many small business owners often fail to invest in this crucial part of their business and tend to make losses or end up shutting down altogether. The following are some of the essentials of money management in business:

Open a commercial bank account

Every business should have recognition as an entity on its own. Therefore, you need to open a commercial bank account with the registered name of your business. Do not mix business money with personal money. Choose a small business friendly bank to bank with. You should deposit all the money from the business to this account. This creates a line of credit whereby you can use this bank account to get loans and other forms of financing if need be.

Bookkeeping

Proper bookkeeping is also very essential. You can either do the bookkeeping or hire an accountant. Even if you choose to do the book keeping by yourself, you still need professional help- when it comes to making tax forms and end year financial statements. You can keep your own books using convenient computer software that makes your work much easier, simply filling in the figures and letting the software do the rest. You can use this software to create invoices, keep track of payable and receivable accounts and track spending as well.

Create and track different payment options

Nowadays, customers can pay for goods and services through so many different ways. They can use checks, debit cards, credit cards or even electronic cash transfer. As a matter of convenience to your clients, you need to avail these different means of payment and track these payments as well. Cash payments are easy because there is no processing time, but when it comes to cards and electronic transfer methods, you need to develop a working system that enables continuous flow of business considering the processing time.

Establish payment terms

You need to have a clear payment terms policy that all your customers and adhere to. One of the crippling challenges that most small businesses face is the friendliness that comes from dealing with a small market and this leads to extending credit to customers who are not worth it. You need to standardize the way customers pay while still offering some form of flexibility to customers who cannot front the full payment. Have written payment terms describing deposits, instalment payments and credit extensions.

Debt collection

One of the necessary evils of running a business is debt collection. When you extend lines of credit to customers, there is always the risk that you will receive late payment or not receive any at all. It is essential to chase these payments because they are a part of the business cash flow. Debt collection is a legal process and you can hire a debt collection professional to help you collect payments from delinquent clients. It is advisable to keep the lines of communication with the customer open. Have a specific set of days after which to call a debt collector. For most businesses, 90 days is an acceptable grace period.

To know more about small business finances, visit – http://leasequit.com/.

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How to Create Quality SEO Friendly Content

Content marketing is an invaluable tool to any business with an online presence, thanks to its cost-effectiveness, wide potential reach and long-term benefits. When it comes to search engine optimisation, the focus is on creating content that is highly visible on websites like Google, in order to generate traffic and leads.

In terms of creating solid, SEO friendly content, you need to consider the way search engine algorithms work, as well as the target audience of your content, and then balance these two aspects. This article presents some useful tips to make sure you strike that balance and create quality content, which works for your company.

Use SEO Tools to Steer Content

A business or SEO company has a range of tools available to them, which can steer them in the right direction when it comes to creating highly visible content. Sites like Soovle will help you to pinpoint popular search terms, while Portent’s Content Idea Generator can help you to think of interesting subjects. Then, of course, search engines like Google have a number of their own tools to make use of.

“We have used Google’s Keyword Planner to identify a list of valuable terms and phrases,” says Graham Charlton from Econsultancy. “Having identified these terms, our content team then brainstormed article ideas to target [them]. This kind of planning exercise ensures that the content we create does as much work for us as possible.”

Make Content Evergreen

An experienced search agency will often reference the importance of evergreen content – that is, content which retains its relevance for a long period of time. For example, news pieces may not be ideal for SEO, because they can become dated quickly, but advice pieces stay useful for months or even years.

In relation to search engine optimisation, the primary benefits of evergreen content are its ability to continue to generate traffic, leads and shares on social media sites long after its publication date. As a result, this enables content to occupy valuable positions in search results for much longer than current affairs articles.

Take Care With Keywords

Once you have decided upon the content you want to produce and the keywords you want to include within it, you need to consider how they are used. Many readers are familiar with the concept of SEO and while that can be a positive, it means that any jarring use of keywords will stand out like a sore thumb. For this reason, keywords need to make sense within the context of the sentences and paragraphs they are in, and relate to the heading.

In addition to context of keywords, it is also crucial to think about placement. It can be beneficial, for instance, to include popular SEO keywords in the title itself, but it can be counter-productive to place your keywords in close proximity of one another.

Remember to Include Images

Finally, it is worth remembering that graphics can also play a valuable role in your SEO strategy, helping your content to show up in image searches, like Google Images. The most important steps are to include an alt tag (the ‘label’ of your image) so that search engine crawlers know what it is about and are able to index it. Also ensure the file name is descriptive and appropriate for the image.

“If you spend hours crafting the perfect post, don’t miss out on the chance to optimise your images for maximum search engine benefit,” says Derek Halpern, a marketing expert and the founder of Social Triggers. As a further tip, due to the fact that page load times can impact SEO, smaller images are generally better, where possible.

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Online Business Data Tools for Small Business

Growth and traction are among the primary goals of any startup, along with raising brand awareness and loyalty. For any business to take a sustainable path to growth, entrepreneurs will need to make decisions that will affect various factors like product lifecycle, human resources, marketing, and others. To ensure positive impact, these decisions will need to be based on data.

Why Make Decisions Based on Data

Data driven decisions help your business by ensuring you’re working toward continuous improvement, meeting accountability requirements, focusing your efforts and monitoring progress, and developing a sense of community through your organization.

Every business has to start with a plan. And no matter how well thought out and executed that plan may be, it will likely deviate from what you expected. You’ll need to use the data you’ve collected from your operations or customers to make educated changes to the plan, to make sure your business stays on the right track to growth and success.

The data will help you see how well you’re meeting goals, keeping you accountable. You’ll be able to use it to set new goals once you’ve reached the first ones you established. And when everyone works together as a team to use the data to move the business forward, you’ll foster community with the staff.

How to Incorporate Data in Your Decision Making

First, determine what it is you want to know. Data can be used to determine a lot of information about a business, for instance:

How are customers responding to our sales and marketing campaigns?
Which employee is bringing in the most sales?
Which customers are giving the most value?

Next, determine which data you’ll need to get the answers you’re looking for. This can be anything from web analytics to CRM data.

From there, collect the data. The more sources of data you have at your disposal, the better informed your decisions can be.

Gather insights. Look at the data to determine answers to your questions. Look at all the data you have available to discover what other information it provides, and keep it in mind for making other decisions as they arise. For example, your web analytics data can tell you how long people are spending on your website, where they spend most of the time, and the path they take through your site. If bounce rates are high, or if conversions are less than ideal, it could mean you need to further optimize your web copy, navigation, layout or other elements.

The final step is to use the data to make recommendations/decisions. Once you determine which employee brings in the most sales, for instance, you could decide to reward his or her efforts. Once you find out who your most valuable customers are, you could reward them with a special discount or promotion to encourage more sales, or to encourage word-of-mouth marketing from them.

Tools for Acquiring Data

Many tools for data acquisition are now available as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product, which means these are accessible enough for small businesses, but scalable enough to accommodate growth. Here are a few notable examples.

Cyfe is a social media analytics tool and business dashboard that allows you to examine your audience from a variety of channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, to see what’s going on with your outreach and engagement activities. With the available data, you can then determine whether or not changes need to be made to your strategy and campaigns.

NetBiscuits is an analytics platform designed to help marketers and web developers improve their channels for multi-screen devices. It detects the device, and then displays analytics data for each – so marketers can see how well their website is performing on a desktop/laptop compared to a smartphone or even a smart-TV. The platform also allows marketers to ensure the right content is delivered to the right device to improve the user experience.

Google Analytics is a free, robust web analytics tool that allows you to track a variety of metrics. Find out where people are coming to your website from (so you can spend your marketing budget wisely), what page they’re leaving your website from, how long they’re staying on each page, how many people are converting (you can set custom conversion goals), and how well your AdWords campaigns are working (analytics for that can be integrated), and more.

Cooladata is a data powerhouse. It allows you to see data for nearly any business question you want to ask, giving you the power to really harness the data. Keep a close eye on key performance indicators (KPIs), segment your audience, analyze your sales funnel, and more.

Where to Apply Data Driven Decisions

Social media can tell you a lot about how customers are responding to your business. You can gather data about who’s talking about your products and services, who’s interested in what you have for sale, who’s not interested, who’s had a positive experience with your company, who has had a negative experience with your company, and more.

Email marketing is a wonderful way to reach current and new customers. Data about how many subscribers you have, how many people unsubscribe, how many people open your messages and click through to the websites you link in them is critical to learning how to adjust your campaigns. With data, you can determine the best day of the week or time of the day to send your messages. Data can also help you optimize email subject lines to attract more opens or clicks. You can also optimize frequency and the types of messaging, in order to improve conversions.

Customer service is key to the success of your business. After all, 86% of customers will leave a business, based on bad customer service experience, and 54% will share a bad customer service experience, compared to 33% who share a good one. Data about the customer service experience will help you see what’s working, and what’s not, so you can find ways to improve your customer service.

Conclusion

In the end, data-driven decisions have the power to propel your business. Ignoring the data – or failing to collect it in the first place – has the potential to sink your business. Why not use data to your advantage? If the big corporations do it, small businesses can, too.

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A Small Business’s Guide to PPC

The core principles behind PPC are really quite simple. Your advert will appear during a relevant consumer search on keywords that you define and you pay a fee, based on the amount of competition around those keywords, if the consumer clicks on your ad. In this way PPC advertising is one of the most efficient and trackable marketing strategies for any small business looking to drive potential customers onto their website. When it comes to generating a successful PPC campaign however, a quality advert and relevant keywords are just the tip of the iceberg.

PPC advertising gets results but the competition can be fierce and the search engine results pages (SERPs) can at times feel like a battlefield, with thousands of businesses vying to get their advert on the first page for a whole range of competitive industry keywords and keyphrases. In addition to this fierce competition, search engines are constantly changing their PPC algorithms, requiring any effective campaign to have the knowledge and ability to keep track of it all.

Before even launching a PPC campaign then, there are a few steps every business needs to take.

Establish your Goals

The goals you choose will dictate the type of PPC account you need and the direction it takes. Consider carefully, and decide if you want your campaign to create a surge of traffic to your site, generate leads, establish brand awareness, or be a direct sales effort. Although it’s tempting to want to drive as much traffic to your site as possible, with a view to converting them all to sales, sometimes it might be more beneficial in the long run to generate some genuine brand awareness and get people talking about your company, your content and ultimately your products.

Determine your Advertising Budget

How much is each customer worth to your business and how much you are willing to spend to bring them in. Let’s say the average customer is worth $200 to your business and you are willing to spend $100 to get that customer. The next thing to work out is how many people you need to direct towards your landing page in order to get that customer (conversion rate). If you have a conversion rate of 10% then in order to insure an acceptable ROI you would want to pay no more than $5 a lead. (This calculation gets a lot more complicated when you consider how conversion rates can fluctuate based on all sorts of factors, from landing page to advertising text and things like AdWords Quality Score).

Find a good PPC Management Company

You could attempt running the campaign yourself, but unless you are an expert in PPC management, it is far more time and cost efficient to hire a professional company than to try managing it yourself.

Do you know your CPM from your CPC and CPA? Do you know the differences between impressions, hits, and views? Knowing what these things are is only half the battle, it’s understanding how they all individually affect your campaign and can influence each other.

What about your campaign settings? Should you have different ad groups for each region? Is it better to target different regions or a select area? Is your campaign losing money because of a poorly designed ad? Or is it due to poor choice in keywords and that your landing pages are completely off message?

Whilst it’s not beyond the wit of any small business owner to get to grips with these things, a good PPC management company will know how to set up an efficient and profitable campaign from the outset, a fact that will likely save you a lot of wasted money on a poorly optimised campaign. Moreover, managing a successful PPC campaign is a huge drain on time and can end up amounting to a full time job with the constant analysis and tweaking required; a job you probably don’t have time for. As with any business decision however, do your research and make sure the company you choose is reputable and is the right fit for your company.

Budgeting for a PPC Campaign

There are four primary ways a PPC management agency might charge you:

The most common form of payment is based on a percentage of the total monthly amount you spend on advertising, generally between 10% to 20%.
Other companies, however, may prefer to bill you at an hourly rate. Initial charges are high when you pay by the hour (as the agency invests time in building the campaign), but costs will be greatly reduced once the account is up and running.
The third option, perhaps the fairest of all, is that you pay for the quality of your account’s performance based upon pre-agreed metrics. Unfortunately, this method only works if the agency is able to track your entire system for conversions (which is complicated), or they trusts you to be completely honest with them regarding conversion (which is rare).
The fourth option relies on a fixed fee for each service offered by the management company. The result is generally clear-cut, as each management option you select for your account is simply added to your monthly bill.

Although it can require a bit of research to find the right PPC agency for your account, your efforts will be well rewarded. In the hands of a professional management agency, a pay per click advertising is one of the best ways of increasing online traffic for your business and meeting your online marketing goals.

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7 Must Have Online Tools for Small Businesses

As a small business owner, maintaining a smooth communication and boosting employee performance are your primary goals. Most companies today, rely on a variety of online applications and utilities that help them manage their day to day activities. But for small businesses, it is often the question of where to start from. To solve this confusion, listed below are some of the best applications that small businesses must use.

1. Google Business Apps

Google Business Apps

Google Business Apps is a combined bundle of various must haves for your small business that includes important utilities such as Gmail, Google Hangouts, Google Drive, Google calendar and Google Docs. According to Google Inc., the business apps are being used by a large no. of companies (upto 5 million), which also include a majority of fortune 500 companies. The Gmail feature also allows you to set up your personalized domain (@yourwebsitename.com) and offers various plans for storage space on Google drive. The Google docs are a convenient web version of Microsoft office utilities and allow you to create and edit documents, spreadsheets and slideshows online. With Google business apps, you are sure to form a congestion free network between the employees, management and the clients.

2. Google Drive

Google Drive App is a cloud sync service, which allows the users to upload all type of files on the Google servers. Google drive app is available for a variety of platforms such as Windows (XP and higher), Windows Phones, Android and iOS. Once you install the app, it creates a separate folder on your system where you can simply drop the files that you wish you upload to the Cloud. It includes an office suite and allows editing and creation of spreadsheets, documents and presentations. The integration with Gmail also allows a variety of functions while using the office suite. Launched in 2012, Google Drive is said to be used by more than 200 million active users in the world. Truly, Google drive is one of the best free pro business tools for business owners.

3. Skype Chat

Despite of its criticism due to its slow performance, Skype is one of the best free chat servers you can use for office communication. The application is available for free and can be installed on a variety of operating systems such as Windows, iOS, Blackberry, Android and Windows Phone etc. While the application is mainly used to make free voice calls, its chat server also allows you to share a variety of files online with ease. With more than 600 million users online, Skype is one of the best chat and video calling apps in the world.

4. Wave Accounting

Wave Accounting

As a small business owner, hiring a personalized accountant is something that you cannot afford. To make things easier, you can use a variety of accounting apps available for PCs and smartphones. Launched in 2010, Wave provides a double entry accounting utility, which is able to directly import data from the bank accounts, track expenses and also generate invoices. Upon registration, you also get a card swiping tool and a receipt scanning tool, which can be integrated with your Smartphone. The utilities are entirely free of charge and the organization generates its revenues through the card processing fees when the card swiping tool is used.

5. Evernote

Evenote

Evernote is like a digital version of the post it notes, which allows note-taking and archiving of various files and folders. The notes can be either, text, webpage excerpts, photographs, images, voice reminders or an old fashioned handwritten note. The service is available for a freemium price that requires the user to pay a price to access features that are more advanced. Evernote is compatible with a variety of operating platforms such as Windows, Android, Blackberry and Windows phone etc.

6. HootSuite

HootSuite

Social media is no fun when you’re looking for an online presence for your organization. Especially when you have to manage several different social media platforms at once, making it difficult to maintain a presence everywhere. Launched in 2008, HootSuite integrates all the popular social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, YouTube and Tumbler. It provides a dashboard which is integrated in the web browsers and allows simultaneous sharing of messages across all networks. With more than 10 million users worldwide, HootSuite is indeed the solution for all your social media troubles.

7. UserTesting

For web developers, it is always a challenge to create websites that are highly user friendly and free from any performance lags and slowdowns. This is a must for e-commerce website owners who must keep on improving the quality of their website to ensure sales. UserTesting provides a free 3^rd party review of your website. The results are shown in a video, in which a person is shown browsing through your website and highlighting the grey areas in the website’s design and performance. Instead of simply gathering general opinions on how they feel about your website, it might be a good thing to know the anomalies in your website through a professional.

Small businesses are stepping stones that lead to the fortune-500 club. As the competition among businesses has moved to a digital environment, it has become essential for business owners to be ahead in the race. The above tools will certainly help you improve your productivity while providing that professional edge to your organization’s workflow.

Featured Image by denise carbonell, CC BY 2.0

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Are You a Potential Microfinance Ireland Client?

Michael Johnston explains what a typical microfinance Ireland client looks like. They are the mum and pap, the normal, every day life business. The core of the (rural) Irish economy. Nearly everyone really.

You can apply here for a loan http://microfinanceireland.ie/how-to-apply/

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What is Local SEO And Why Is It Important?

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is a marketing technique engaged by businesses to help rank their company websites in Google and other search engines. As society has become increasingly technology focused in the last decade, more businesses have decided they want to invest is an online presence and as a result SEO as a practise as grown. Due to the increase in online activity, national SEO has become a very competitive game and unless you are top of your industry, your business might struggle to make the first page of Google for the terms you want to rank for. It’s not all doom and gloom however, national results can be achieved over time but for smaller businesses who want quick results, we can introduce local SEO.

Local SEO stands for local search engine optimisation and involves the same onsite and offsite elements as national SEO, the difference being local marketing targets specific town and city locations rather than focussing on the entire country. Local SEO has grown over the last few years with the increase in smartphone usage. As more people search, on the go, on their mobiles for local services, local SEO has become increasingly important.

Local SEO is ideal for smaller businesses who want to attract local custom. For example if you are a plumber in Derby, you want to attract local, Derbyshire customers rather than get enquiries from someone based in Newcastle. Local SEO will help you rank for your business keywords on a local basis so when someone searches for ‘steakhouse Sheffield’, they will be greeted with a list of steakhouses in that area rather than the opposite end of the country.

Why is local SEO important?

With more and more people online, local SEO will help you stand out. Rather than your four man band trying to compete with a worldwide cooperation for national rankings, local SEO will help you be the top for your town.
Attract local customers. Attracting local customers can be preferable for a lot of smaller businesses who may not be able to handle large scale contracts.
Local SEO will help boast your brand and raises awareness of your business. It will help get your name out there and make people aware of your services/products.
Beat your competitors. Get online and become top dog before your competitor down the road does the same. The internet has been growing rapidly over the past couple of decades and it’s not showing any signs of stopping any time soon. Make that leap online and get ahead of your competitors.

How does local SEO work?

Local SEO involves multiple offsite and onsite techniques. Firstly marketers will look at employing location keywords in your content and title tags as well as ensuring your website includes your address. Then they will look at building local citations and listings to emphasise that connection between you and the location.

Local SEO works the same as national SEO. It involves the same onsite and offsite marketing principles however it involves targeting a specific location(s). It is a great way for smaller businesses to get their brand noticed and attract local customers.

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