Make Your Small Business Accessible and Gain More Customers

It takes, as always, a catastrophe to show up the cracks in the ways business works. One of these catastrophes broke on the second day of the year and started to create waves today and it featured Google operating in violation of its own rules.

These are the very same rules Google used to ban JCPenney and Overstock in two highly publicized Google penalties which presaged the Panda Update http://helpmyseo.com/seo-tips/334-googles-panda-update-hits-low-quality-content-and-bad-links.html which, itself, was supposed to banish low quality content from the web.

As Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land writes:

…much more disturbing to me. Google’s paying to produce a lot of garbage, the same type of garbage that its Panda Update was designed to penalize.

Danny Sullivan does goes on to speculate that the responsible party is the third-party agency hired for the job and that probably Google will punish itself for the infraction and, as I am writing all this, the story is still playing out.

The reason it is important to you is because its reportage highlighted issues which have to do with website content and the way it is presented. Take, for instance, Slashgear, a website which covers technology and gadgets which picked up on the story because of its high visibility and quickly wrote a post consisting, mostly of quotes reporting Google’s Blunder on Chrome Paid Links Campaign.

Reading it I see nothing wrong there. It is pithy, to be sure and a little sparse on details but it covers everything which has happened quickly, summarises the storyline and gives the results. As a matter of fact, on a really busy day, with the pressure of a tight book deadline and the need to record the year’s first podcast the SlashGear post made a lot more sense than the Search Engine Land one, which is longer and requires a lot more active thinking from me, which would divert my energy and attention.

Then, I happened to scroll down on the SlashGear comments and there the story was a little different:

Hey Chris. Speak English
will ya?

Said one commenter who received seven plaudits, to the writer of the piece. While another said:

This article might have been better if the author's intent was to communicate with us rather than with himself. As it is, I imagine only he knows what he's talking about.

Jargon is the Enemy of SEO and Customers

What SlashGear forgot was that, unlike a specialist website such as Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com/ where SEOs go to read pieces on SEO, its own audience consisted of folk who are more ordinary and their main interests are technology and gadgets. This does not make them necessarily experts in optimization and its self-referential and frequently obtuse language which bandies back and forth terminology such as ‘nofollow’ links and ‘internal rank juice’. While the editor’s judgement on the importance of the piece was sound and it was something which the site’s audience needed to be informed about, their execution which failed to take into account their readership’s knowledge limits, made it work against them.

This frequently happens in business too. Sites which make perfect sense to experts looking for particular products or services, fail to take into consideration the fact that there may be those who need the same products or services and happen to not know what they are called.

This omission costs them customers. Without extra content to explain the jargon they handicap their SEO and lose out on a big chunk of potential customers. With the jargon they manage to frustrate those who do find them and might be thinking of making a purchase or engaging their services. Frustration rarely turns into conversion.

Make Sure Your Website Is Not Making the Same Mistake

With online customers being more choosy than ever you really need to work hard to make sure you have created a website that is as open and welcoming as possible. A website which works well in terms of optimization and manages to help those who may not be experts in the subject matter of the site itself understand just how it can help them.

Here are the steps you need to take to ensure you are not losing customers this way:

01. Check your site for jargon. If you find any, make sure you explain it by creating additional content. This is great in terms of creating additional, valuable content for SEO purposes and it is also great for human visitors.

02. Walk through your site like a customer. Forget what you know and forget that you think everyone also knows it. Assume that suddenly everyone has forgotten the name of the thingamajig you sell. Check now, would anyone understand what your site is about? More important still, would they find it through search?

03. Create a rule or process for your business. In order to avoid from ever making a mistake like this create a rule or process for your business which addresses it. It might be something as simple as “Write every post like it is going to be read by my aunt Beryl, who is 85” or as hierarchical as “No post will ever be published without first being seen by the founder of the business.” The thing is that as long as it works then it is good.

Accessibility and openness are the buzzwords that power the web today. Make them yours and you will have at least removed some obstacles from your business’ path to success.