VISIONARY - Music Inc. Magazine

Search engine
optimization made
easy for small music
retailers with
limited budgets
46 I MUSIC INC. I JULY 2011
MY TURN I BY LESLIE FALTIN
Get Found on Google
Your competitor isn’t down the street or on the other
side of town. Your competitor is as close as the nearest
smartphone or PC. And as a brick-and-mortar store,
you have to give your customers a reason to choose you
over the low-price, single-click-and-you’re-done sellers.
When I need something, I don’t go to the Yellow Pages. I go to
Google, as do many of your customers. Your website is usually the
first impression you make, and it can be a place to
impress or depress. It can be dynamic, where people
check in for news, specials and product, or it can be
a stagnant pool of boring, outdated yuck. It’s your
choice.
For years, I’d discounted our website. It was a
placeholder where people could find our hours. We
hired local high school kids to maintain it, and invariably,
they’d move out of town, or I’d lose their phone
numbers. About two years ago, I decided to not only
fix our site but make it much better. I resent having
to pay people to do something I can do myself, so I
decided that I’d learn how to run it. The end result?
A cheaper, more focused, more dynamic advertising
package than anyone else could produce for me.
ORGANIC SEARCH
One of my first orders of business was
getting our site seen. Google has various
ways of ranking websites. And if you search
for, say, a Yamaha FS720S guitar, two things
will usually show up: the search results —
ranked by Google’s special formula — and the
Google ads off to the right side. Here are a few
ideas for achieving a better Google ranking
organically.
Your site should link to your vendors’
sites, and you should request these links
from your vendors. I wish vendors did a
better job maintaining lists of local dealers. This is something
that takes a fair amount of patience and tenacity, to check your
vendors’ sites and to ensure that your info is correct — oh, and to
call again to ask when it’ll be done. Since this helps your ranking
and helps your customers find you, it’s a good investment of time.
Press releases and news articles about your company
are also a good way to bump
up your ranking. Recently, I
received a press release about one
of my vendors donating a whole
acoustic guitar to charity. Wow.
I’ve donated so much stuff to my
local music programs for silent
auctions, it’s not even funny. The
difference is my vendor wrote
a press release that got picked
up on a slow news day, and I
didn’t. Press releases that get
picked up help boost your rank.
There are all sorts of people
and companies that want to sell
you services to increase your
rank. The steps I’ve taken to
increase my rank have helped
tremendously, and they were free.
PAID SEARCH
That said, there are some useful
paid services, especially
Google AdWords. These are the
ads on the side of Google search
pages. Sometimes, they’re found
on top. They’re also on You-
Tube sites and smartphones, and
they’re typically a pay-per-click
deal. (My employees like to tell
me about all the weird places
they’ve seen my Google ads.)
The great thing about Google
AdWords is it’s ridiculously easy
to set up and can be quite targeted.
Google has all sorts of online
tutorials to help. You can set
how much you’d like to pay on a
daily basis, too. Spend a dollar,
and see what happens.
Google AdWords only costs
money if someone clicks on