Web Design for Business Brokers a Specialty!
Business Brokers: Marketing your business online requires different thinking than marketing with conventional media. You must competently address computers, as well as your visitors.
SEO
is most wisely utilized in the planning and building stages of a web project - built in, not built on!
I have been working with business brokers for 20+ years!
Business Brokers: If your web site has not been upgraded in five years -
you are surely experiencing difficulty competing now.
Effective Web Design for business brokers and SEO are not two separate things!
Since I started web design I have built sites for business brokers, insurance groups, and financial organizations - as well as fitness trainers, non-profit organizations, talent agencies and even psychics. However, over the years I have become specialized in web design for business brokers. I know the market!
Through these years I have developed the ability to see through the eyes of the business broker and know his needs. Add to that, learning industry terms and strategies, and you have a web contractor that is not an outsider to your industry.
The "Search Engine Upgrade" concept was designed to address the problem of web sites that have become outdated in either appearance, technical issues or both - and those more recent, that just weren't designed with search in mind. The most serious of issues are the technical ones - they affect your business and bottom line. Since real estate and business brokerages have become largely web-based enterprises,
SEO for business brokers is literally a no-brainer!
Google, Bing/Yahoo, and all the rest are demanding that you assist them in their monumental task of serving up millions of web sites by
trimming unnecessary code characters or they will pass you by. The coding that worked five years ago is obsolete and needs trimming down - a process called "
minifying"
Typical Issues Hurting Business Brokers:
From the perspective of someone who has specialized, 20+ years, in web services for business brokers!
- Copied Content (#1 issue)
- Content piracy is rampant among business brokers. Google was tasked to pare down the search results and get rid of the chaff. A good place to start was people who copy and paste (steal) content from other sites, ie., from people who wrote their own material! Originality is rewarded by Google.
- Failure to recognize changes in the web environment (#2 issue)
- In the past five years, immense changes have occurred on the net. Many brokers have sites that haven't even been looked at in five or more years.
Many changes have occurred, but here are some of the biggest concerns that will affect your performance -
- The rise of the mobile device! 50% of all online traffic now is accessed on mobile devices like smartPhones, iPads, etc.
- Clunky, slow loading mobile pages that were designed for broadband connections take forever to load
- Displaying your site on mobile bandwidth is like returning to the days of dialup moden connections for PC's - load time is important again!
- Forget Flash! Apple does not support flash on their mobile devices
- Failure to recognize social media. Although the fad is somewhat waning for serious business, social media does have some impact on your search results - especially if you have a Facebook business pages. You can create links to your own pages!
- Facebook business pages will show up in a search.
-
MLS listing displays that don't limit per-page listings can easily go over the 100 link maximum and be penalized in search results.
These factors, added together, can cause weak performance.
- Outdated page code
- Google has posted its guidelines for a "Google Friendly Site", and they have become more demanding because the huge increase in web sites, worldwide, has imposed huge demands on them.
- Affiliations to organizations with weak listing services
- Some MLS services give your site incoming links and others host their listings on their own servers. You get no "link juice" from the latter category. Since business brokers won't link into other independent business brokers sites, your main source of LEGITIMATE inbound links is MLS!
Avoid "Industry-speak" on your web pages!!
For example, "listings" is not a useful search word! Most new business sales are to.....
- First Time Buyers
- And "New Americans"
"Industry Speak" is useless to those outside your industry. Using industry terminology for keywords only draws visits from other business brokers - checking out the competition. Are you drawing hits but no bites? Worse yet, are you using "Industry Speak" in PPC campaigns? Ouch!
It is not impossible that a Real Estate agent or Business Broker with only....
- A good haircut and one clean suit
- A decent car
- And an impressive web site and a wireless laptop....
....could do a bang up business!
Your web site is your office - and the cheapest office you'll ever have. It is your credibility - and it conveys your image to your client before he or she even meets you. You only get one chance to make a first impression.
A holistic overhaul is the most cost effective method. It is actually less expensive than fixing what you have now. The added benefit of also upgrading your front end is, you would then also look more successful.
........Michael Walls
Sell a Jacksonville, Florida Business - Jacksonville Business Broker
