Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

Little Flower Candy Co.: Know When to Hold ‘Em!

(Continued)

And she’s never had to.Thanks to great connections in L.A.’s visible foodie scene,word of mouth,

and some very complimentary press coverage, her business is doing extremely well.When we spoke

with her in the fall of 2005, she was looking toward the holiday season with excitement—and a

good deal of trepidation.Acknowledging that the appeal of her product relies on the small-batch,

handmade approach, she says,“I could ruin my reputation in one fell swoop by being greedy.”

We have no doubt that an SEO campaign could bring Christine lots of new customers. But if things

heat up too quickly, she may have more work than she can handle. At her current pace,she has

time to get on the phone and call a Web customer to work out an ordering glitch and to be there

for her family. Of course, she’s open to SEO for her site, but, as Christine says,“It’s hard to know

whether to put the cart before the horse or the horse before the cart.”Like any marketing strat-

egy, SEO requires that careful consideration be given to the balance between a business’s long-

term goals and current capabilities.

Christine is in control of her company, and she is in a position to have control over its web pres-

ence. She has a good kind of problem. Her “real-world”buzz will be easy to translate into a web

buzz, when the time is right!

Her site was built in a hurry, under pressure to get a store online in time for an article about her

company that was about to go to press.The publication made it clear:no online store, no article.A

friend quickly built her site, and Christine wrote the text just hours before it went live. Since the

site was built for a ready-made audience of readers who had the URL in print, almost no thought

was given to the search engines.

As SEO experts, here’s what we noticed about her site:There were only two links pointing to it, and

neither of them came from the large publications that have printed articles about her company.

With such a rabid following and easy word-of-mouth marketing happening in the real world, she

could easily get more links. Also, her site features the word

handmade

because she’s not fond of

the term

gourmet

.But what are her potential customers searching for? A little research would go a

long way in determining if she’s losing out on traffic by using the wrong terminology.

Brick-and-Mortar

If you had the chance to put one thing in front of your customers, you’d probably give

them your street address, not your web address, and that’s the way it should be. Your

site plays second fiddle to your day-to-day business. After all, the best way to turn

browsers into customers is to get them to walk through your door. You may not even

be sure why you have a website, except that everyone else is doing it. So let’s talk

about how to make your site do its job of playing the supporting role.

c02. 7:58 28