Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

"They need a good solid website that has been created with SEO principles in mind and they need to be able to easily update it."

What small businesses really care about is cost effective customer acquisition.

A new website without a marketing engine attached is a tougher sell and is a crowded marketplace - you'll wind up selling against Intuit, Yahoo and other giants that have a virtually unlimited inbound flow of leads (small biz that buys QuickBooks etc).

SEO is effective, but slow.

Google's new hyper-local search features are perhaps a faster payoff for SEO but there are plenty of localized SEO / SEM companies already out pushing that pitch like Real Local.

All that naysaying notwithstanding, there's a great opportunity to build something incredible in the small business space but it's not unconquered from lack of trying.

It works a lot faster than you might think. Sure, if you're setting up a new site in San Francisco or Austin this kind of thing will be a much harder sell. But in small-town USA where no one knows what SEO means, it's actually really fast.

We've had people jump to #1, #2, and #3, of target keywords in under a week (we don't advertise this, btw, because it's unrealistic), but 30-45 days is very common.

There are millions of businesses in markets less than 25k people, and those people are our targets.

This is directionally accurate in my experience. 90% of ranking for Ogaki Dog Care is showing up. (It is the same story as "American presidents bingo cards", essentially, except you'll have inlinks direct to that page.)

And that comment is now ranked first on Google for Ogaki Dog Care :-)

+1

"What small businesses really care about is cost effective customer acquisition."

The other high order bit for small businesses is repeat customers. Loyalty programs on mobile could be the killer app that gets small businesses online.

Why mobile?

I own two retail franchises. What I want from a loyalty program is for it to be passive based on the credit card and deeply integrated with my point of sale.

I care less about having a website than appearing favorably and accessible in search results. Mobile seems like more hassle than it is worth.

Now, in addition to owning two retail stores, I am a professional developer, including iPhone and android apps. My current project is BI for franchises.

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