Bensquare

I met my osteopath, mark, in a business event organised by business link last year as he is setting up a  business to deliver his osteopath service in client's home. It's good for the elder or those can't go out (like busy mum etc), on the other hand, Mark doesn't need to rent a expensive office to operate this business. 

I was very impressed with his knowledge in osteopath and his sense of humor. More importantly, I have a bad neck and shoulder pain due to the long working hours with computer.

Mark comes to my home today and gave me a treatment (my 2nd treatment so far). We have a chat about how to market his osteopath business online. Mark has a simple website and he plans to pay some of so called the google ads (SEO) expert for that, but does it help to generate business for a new website?

To speak from my own experience, I build my first website selling mobile unlocking software in 2002. I was very excited and use google ads to generate traffic to my web. Money goes, I saw the traffic, but no business generated ? why ?? people do click in, but they don't buy. OK, at least I got the traffic.

Then I gave up the google ads strategy. I do a google search on those keywords related to my service to see who is on the page 1 on google. I noticed mobile phone forums are always coming to the top. Hey, Ok, it's easy then, I just post some reply on there, so whenever people do those keywords search, they will go to the forum and see my reply, hopefully, they will then click to my web.

At the beginning, I reply and say "hey guy, I can do that, here is the link", and u can guess, the next day, my post was deleted because moderator treated it as "spam"... Then I modified a bit of my strategy. I answered the question advising people what software they could use and they can email me if they want to. Also, I engaged more to the conversation related to other mobile phone aspect. It helps to build up a bit of reputation / trust. Till today, the forum is the BEST marketing tools and generate quality customers to my web. More than that, I didn't spend a penny on it.

As I said to Mark, as a startup business (including me), I think building up the reputation / trust and minimize cost are very important. 

In summary, I suggested Mark the following

• Answering people questions in forum
• Add your web link in signature in those forum post, so people can click and go to your web
• Put some videos on youtube Eg. how Osteopath can help you etc. Mark gave me some good advice before about my sitting posture which is one of major cause of my pain.
• submit to local business directory (yell.co.uk , freeindex.co.uk etc)

These all things are free. You know as startup, we want to keep cost at minimum. 

Personally, I think SEO is becoming important when your business grows and your web starts to generate traffic itself , but not from the forum / local directories etc.  Then you will be more benefit from SEO for helping your web to be one page 1 of google which means EVERYTHING to a website.