Been too busy to post the pictures and videos from my recent event in Las Vegas for the Specialty Equipment Manufacturers Association–boy, that’s a mouthful–until today. SEMA is a trade group of the automobile aftermarket industry–they’re the folks that manufacture and sell anything you need for your car that did not come as original equipment. Read on to hear more about what I said at the SEMA show on ways to do search marketing for free. It applies to you no matter what industry you’re in.
Brian Offenberger and his great team at the Aftermarketer Club invited me to speak at the event, even though I didn’t know that much about the aftermarket industry. I have worked with one client at Converseon who is an aftermarket manufacturer, so I wasn’t totally ignorant, but I knew that everyone in the audience knew more about their business than I did. Nonetheless, I was there to teach them about search, not their own business, so that was OK. Here is a video they shot right before I went on:
Anyway, the presentation went well. (You can see the slides for “Skinflint Search Marketing” yourself to get a flavor of what I talked about. As I do with any small business audience, I emphasized the need to first get your Internet marketing straight before worrying about search. After all, if your Web site stinks, you want as few people to find out about it as possible. I mean, you don’t worry about newspaper advertising for your local store’s grand opening before you have working cash registers–promotion is not yet the right priority.
Your Web site is no different. Only after your Web site is doing a reasonably good job of converting visitors to buyers does it make sense to attract as many people there are you can. And that’s where search marketing comes in. It’s the cheapest and most effective way for any business to attract new customers.
I walked the attendees through the four basic steps you see in the presentation, starting with making sure your pages are in the index, then figuring out what customers are looking for and making sure your content addresses those needs. Then we covered the last step of attracting links to your site to alert the search engines that your content is high quality.
You can also check out this video shot right after the event to give you a flavor of what went on:
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