For the past month, I’ve worked with dozens of small business owners in response to the pandemic and shutdowns. One thing is clear: every small business owner is impacted in some way. For some, business is better than ever (mine included). For others, they’re on the brink of bankruptcy. While these recommendations might not be able to help everyone, hopefully it will provide a lift for a few in this humble attempt to be of service during this weird world we’re all living in right now.


Below are 8 resources and suggestions that small business owners might find useful as they navigate the ebb and flow of running a business during a lockdown:


1. Small Business Loans
The Small Business Administration (SBA) are now providing targeted, low-interest loans (and some grants) to small businesses and non-profits that have been severely impacted by COVID-19.


2. Communicate Updates About Your Business or Nonprofit
Surprisingly, many small business owners have not added any language to their websites addressing any changes or updates regarding the pandemic and how it relates to their practice or business. Are you open or closed? It may seem obvious but it’s worth noting on your website. Also, several online tools are helping address changes by trying to make it easier for you to share updates. Google Business added a few tools so that you can provide a link to your website’s pandemic updates, post an update or mark your business as temporarily closed. You can also adjust your hours temporarily on your Google Business listing.

2020 - Wow. Here we are, in a decade we couldn’t have imagined back in high school but, thanks to television, had visions of flying cars, robots, and time travel in a DeLoreon. We’ve sort of gotten 2 out of 3 with self-driving cars and Roomba vacuum cleaners (wish I had invented that one). I won’t be holding my breath on the time travel, despite social media’s efforts to remind me what I did last summer. And now, let’s travel back to the topic at hand which is improving your small business website in 2020.
​

I’ve had the luxury of working with scores of varying types of business over the years. I’ve helped countless small psychotherapy practices, chiropractors, small furniture stores, bed and breakfast inns and many nonprofit organizations. There are some things that cross all lines of business, so here’s my attempt to  cover most everyone with a few quick recommendations to help you improve your small business website in 2020.


1. Double check all those things you should’ve done in 2019 such as:

• Make sure your website’s address or url begins with https and not http. I’ve talked to several small business owners who thought their website was secured with an SSL certificate only to learn that it was never enabled. Without a secure website, Google has probably lowered your search engine ranking and lots of visitors may have arrived on your site only to be greeting with a scary security warning.
• Take a look at your website on your cell phone and your tablet device and make sure it looks decent. Your website should be responsive which means it should respond to the size of any screen. Another way to check your website’s responsive design is to simply shrink the size of your browser on any computer and watch as your site adjusts accordingly. If you shrink the size of your browser and your site doesn’t adjust the look & feel, then you do not have a responsive site. This is also problematic when it comes to your search engine rankings.

​2. ADA accessibility is becoming increasingly important for websites. There are a variety of standards for judging websites but if you’re a small business, you could simply add a widget or plugin to your site (for free) and that will help you become compliant on a basic level. Take a look in the lower right hand corner of my website, debbielamb.com and you’ll see a free tool called UserWay that is easy to add to sites and also provides a free accessibility statement template you can add to your site. You may not realize your website could give some people seizures do to your creative colors or animations and this app could seriously help those with disabilities. To check your website’s web accessibility, you can use webaccessibility.com, a free and easy tool that will even give your website a score and show you where you can improve.

Google Ads are somehow still mysterious to many small business owners so I thought it might be useful to give a top level mini-overview via my oh so awesome blog. 

On a very basic level, running ads on Google means that when someone searches for something on the internet, an Ad you create appears. It's noted with the word 'Ad' in front of it and is typically at the top of the page. Ads appear when the keywords we choose match a person's search online. So, if you're a Chiropractor, we add that word (and dozens of others) to a list of words or phrases people might type into Google when looking for a healthcare practice like yours. 

There are many ways to advertise using Google's Ad platform and the search method mentioned above is just one of them. Google also has partnerships with many websites that also show their ads. So, after someone does an online search, these ads will begin to appear on other websites that person/computer visits. A third way that ads are delivered to people is by matching the Advertiser's keywords with a news article or blog post's keywords. So, a person could be reading an article about back pain, for example, and Google would be showing ads for local Chiropractors on that page even though the reader might not have conducted a search yet for one.

Negative Keywords
In addition to creating keywords, I also recommend adding negative keywords. For example, if you're a Psychotherapist, we would add the keyword 'therapist' to your ad campaign. Meanwhile we would also add the word 'massage' as a negative keyword so that anytime a search term includes massage (i.e. massage therapist), the ads would not appear.

Eight days into the new year and many are just returning to work and wondering what 2018 will bring for their small business. As a small business consultant, Lamb Consulting sees a wide range of people running their own company but a few things cross all industries as ways nearly everyone can work to begin their new year on a better note. 

1. Update Your Email Lists
For many small business owners, this one falls by the wayside because they feel they are the only ones who know all their clients and industry colleagues. If that sounds familiar, there's no better time than January in a new year to get your email contact lists updated and organized. Referrals will always be your top driver of new business so why put this one off any longer? If using a mail service like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, make it easy on yourself and simply begin by making sure all your contacts there have a first name so you can personalize your emails. Once that's done, work on segmenting your lists into Groups so you can further customize messages. One group could be labeled clients, customers or patients while another could be sectioned off as friends/family. Trust me on this one - it's worth the time.

2. Backup Everything
If you remember Y2K, this is a no-brainer. Every New Year's is an opportunity to remember to backup your files, photos, data, email lists and your website. Dropbox is a great tool (free for the first 2 gigs of space) backing up on the cloud so you can access data from other devices but I'd also suggest a physical, external backup device. For my clients, I download and backup their websites every year - easy to do if you're using Weebly or another web service that doesn't charge extra for such services.

For years I have told my own clients to start a blog.

That old saying for Physicians to take their own advice? I guess that's me now.

So, here we go - Blog post numero uno.

And what to write about? Blogs of course!

Here's why I tell small businesses and healthcare practitioners to start a blog: do it for google. Very few folks may ever read your blog but the purpose isn't actually for your clients or potential clients, although that's a nice benefit. The purpose is to get more words in front of google and other search engines. Google loves text! The more text on your website, the better. And most small organizations don't have a lot of text on their site. Google ranks sites on the number of applicable words from any given search. The more words, the more potential matches - or the better chance of your site appearing higher in a search.

That's it - it's not brain surgery - it's blogging 101. Or, Googling 101?

And why Google?
Because they receive about 65% to 75% of all online searches in the United States right now, depending on which source you're viewing. The next closest search engine gets about half that amount max (Bing or Yahoo). 

Start writing your own blog with anything applicable to your business or your client's business. Don't think of it as giving away free advice as much as it is helping folks to find your website and therefore find you!

Happy blogging to us all.

Need some help? Well, post a comment here in my blog of course! Or, old school, just buzz me! Thanks for reading.