LocalBizBits Local Search Marketing Information and Resources
This is something I have been wanting to comment on for a while. I really like WordPress- its ease of setup, cool widgets, tons of templates available, and the amazing amount of SEO components you can employ with it, make it a no brainer for small business.
If you are a small business and want to “run” your own website, I would recommend using wordpress. When I discuss this with clients, I get a lot of curious looks. WordPress is simply a content management system (CMS). Now there are many options out there for CMS, so if WordPress is not your cup of tea, take a look at some of the other options.
The idea of using WordPress for a small business site is nothing new. A few other articles on the subject are:
Don Campbell’s Why Use WordPress to Power Your Small Business Website and then a case study he report on.
Tim Conley’s 11 Reasons To Use WordPress For Your Business Website and his video tutorial.
If you read these articles, you should come away with the notion that using WordPress can help you control your website more and help with your local search marketing. Bottom line.
I have used wordpress to build a number of sites for local small business, with good results. The main reason I have used it is so that. the small business owner can control his content. Using a CMS, definitely allows a small business owner with little web experience the ability to add, edit, delete information quickly and easily.
Another aspect that I like about using wordpress, it allows the visitor to leave a comment, question, rave, etc for the small business. Interacting with your visitors/customers/clients is a very important component in doing business here in 2009 and beyond.
The SEO aspect of wordpress is great. There are so many components that one can employ to help the site with search engine visibility, geotargeting, keywords, you name it.
A word of caution, do not think that if you build/use wordpress for your site, it will magically appear #1 in Google. You need to make sure you set it up and use it properly! I can get you started off on the right foot but it is your responsiblity to follow up but adding content, responding to comments, questions, adding links etc. It take a little bit of time but as I always say, time spent marketing online is well worth it!
Great post Larry and I couldn’t agree more.
A word of caution though, WordPress is easily hacked so you want to follow the blog posts on WordPress security. There are a few techniques to setup WordPress differently than the default; do your homework and a little extra work saves you tons of headaches!
I built a site, http://flourgirlsbakingco.com using DonCampbells Small Business Theme and with a little work andattention it is ranked number one with our primary keywords. I beleive in the power of Word Press.
I couldn’t agree more! I’m so impressed with how easily WordPress makes it to create a website, even if you have no technical skills, that I’ve just completed a step-by-step tutorial on my site.
WordPress is a very empowering technology that puts a website easily into the reach of every small business, or simply anyone with something to share.
I love WordPress! I have used it for quite a few years now and I have advised all my customers to switch to WordPress due to how fast it’s being picked up by developers and how many new themes, widgets and tools coming up for it. Also, it’s great for someone who is just starting out, but who is planning to move to their own sites as it could be easily packaged and installed as /blog on other site. Great post! Thank you!
My clients love the ease of using a CMS such as WordPress or Joomla. Joomla is a bit more complicated on the backend, but I just set up the user as an administrator without allowing them to change the coding. They love how easy it is to update their website without having to FTP anything, or know any code.
Of course, the search engines love blog posts because it signifies that a website is being updated often.
Great article Larry. Perhaps one of the nicest things about using a WordPress website for your business is that as a business owner you can update it yourself. You are no longer at the mercy of your IT or webmaster to update the site.
Add to that the SEO benefits and you can really build a nice web presence for your business this way.