Websites have to be “adaptive and responsive” to mobile phones today or risk ending up in the cellar for Google search results, warns Joe Walsh, CEO of Dex Media and a veteran of small business marketing. In this video, Joe walks you through the new, mobile reality of online competition. Watch now:
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Hi. This is Joe Walsh. I’m here to help you market your business. I’m the CEO of Dex Media. We do marketing for small businesses across the country. Before that, I was the head of Yellowbook, USA. Both of these companies have been working with small businesses for many years, and it’s been my life’s passion to help lead these local businesses from the print media traditional world into the digital future. Today, it’s more important than ever because big companies are using these really well. They’re marketing in the smartphone world really effectively. They’ve got teams of people working every day to figure out how to come up on top of all the searches, how to have the coolest app, et cetera.
They’re taking market share from the small businesses, from the local businesses. I’m dedicated to help work with local businesses to figure out how to bring those kind of enterprise tools and deliver them to local businesses and help them be successful. Today, we’re going to talk about the foundation, the most basic thing, and that’s your website. Websites have to be adaptive and responsive today. A lot of the traffic out there is guided to wherever it’s going by Google. Google actually gives you a demerit, it pushes you down if you don’t have an adaptive, responsive site. How can you tell if you do? You just pick up a smartphone and do the search. If the type is squint print, if things are hard to find and hard to read, you can be pretty sure it’s not adaptive and responsive.
What they’re doing now is they’re actually putting sites that are built for mobile right up at the top in searches, and sites that are not are being pushed way down. Even when they’re appropriate to the search, they tend to knock them down a little bit. One of the most important things you have to do at the beginning is you’ve got to have an adaptive, responsive site. If your site’s more than a few years old, it probably isn’t. How do you get one of those? You could build it yourself if you have a lot of time and you want to try to do that. There’s a lot of companies out there that will build a modern, current site. Dex Media does that. There are many other companies out there that do that too.
Price points. Probably a couple of hundred dollars a month if you’re going to have somebody build it, and then keep the content fresh and stay with you and help you keep it going. If you don’t keep it fresh, if it’s stale, it’ll automatically begin to fall back down in those rankings again. You’ve got to be committed to keeping it updated, keeping it fresh, keeping some information out there. I think you’re going to want to get into a monthly relationship with somebody who’s going to look after it and keep it current and keep it matching your business’s priorities at any given time.
Next time, we’re going to talk about customer relationship management. Your customers are finding you more and more through this, and so you need to be in a situation where you’ve got a digitized list of your customers and you’ve got a two-way dialog going on with those customers. You’re texting them, you’re emailing them. They’re communicating with you. It’s an easy thing to do. It’s something we’ll talk about next time.
