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thesofaking
08-24-2015, 07:55 PM
I am a brick and mortar furniture retailer. I have 3 retail locations in the San Francisco Bay Area. The name of the business is Sofa Creations. We sell custom sofas, delivered to the customer in 2 weeks at affordable prices. My site which is currently being redone to become more mobile friendly is mysofacreation.com. Once the new site is done I want to start having my staff perform tasks to help my SEO. They have a ton of down time and I need to keep them busy. Two of my locations are fairly new so they could use help with SEO. Please let me know any ideas or feedback you have.

Enock Machodi
08-24-2015, 09:52 PM
I'm not that good at SEO, though I do believe there's a better way to market your Sofa business regardless of whatver SEO tactics exist. But you can as well optimize your Sofa images with keywords that your customers would normally use to find your products or services. Hope it helps!

vangogh
08-25-2015, 10:35 AM
Why not have your employees spend time learning SEO and then applying what they learn? SEO isn't something where you follow a list of tasks, especially without any understanding of what you're doing. You're just as likely to do things in a way that causes harm than does any good.


Two of my locations are fairly new so they could use help with SEO

Unless you created brand new sites for each of these locations, they're part of the existing site and so not new as far as search engines are concerned.

Harold Mansfield
08-25-2015, 11:44 AM
It's really tough to suggest tasks without them having the underlying understanding of online marketing.

I would say to designate one person as the lead and task them with learning more about online marketing and social media so that down the road they will be able to delegate properly. I don't think it's a good idea to have a bunch of people who don't know much about SEO all with their hands in your marketing.

Your approach online needs to be structured and someone needs to be in charge of the company's messaging online.

In the meanwhile you ( the boss) needs to come up with what that is. A plan of what you want to accomplish with your SEO ( Online marketing), and the message and branding that you want to project to your target market ( as well as define exactly who your target market is) so that whoever you have doing it isn't willy nilly just posting crap all over the place and making things worse.

cbscreative
08-25-2015, 01:31 PM
I would agree with what's been said already, having that kind of mish mash marketing and SEO will likely do more harm than good. I suspect you can find something productive for your employees to do while a qualified marketing specialist can provide the help you really need. Having your employees just dive in without proper training is like having me make my own custom sofa.

On an unrelated note, I recommend you PM vangogh and have him change your user name to theSofaKing or the-sofa-king. The way it is now it can be read as the so faking. :)

Alexcook
09-07-2015, 09:14 AM
First of all understand that SEO is about optimizing your website on different Search Engines. Its about making your website indexed & crawled properly on search engines. That's what an SEO professional will do.
Please note that it would be a time consuming task for building good reputation on search engines.

You can try google advertisements or facebook advertisement for targeting new audiences.

kb24
09-11-2015, 12:53 PM
SEO is not something you can learn in one day. Its going to take time. If your workers have a ton of down time maybe they can post your business up on facebook to get the word out. Or create a fanbook page? Create a video? Just thinking on the top of my head here..

profitlabs
09-11-2015, 04:39 PM
Hey Sofa King,

I will have to disagree with most of the people on this thread.

There is Indeed tasks your staff can do on a daily basis.

In fact this will probably yield great results since they are so familiar with your product.

Here is some stuff your staff can do on there downtime to help with your seo:

1. Find Furniture forums and have them answer questions. Make sure the signature has a link back to your website.

2. Find blog posts about furniture or related topics and have them leave comments. Make sure the comments are thoughtful and include a link back to your website if it makes sense.

Some comment forms will let you include your website link as well.

3. Submit your website to directories - Have your staff locate relevant directories and submit your website under the appropriate category.

4. Have your staff contact blog owners who write about related topics like home design, and ask them if you can post a guest article on there blog. Otherwise known as guest posting.


If they say yes, then have your staff write a 400-500 word article and submit it. Or maybe outsource the article writing.

5. Have your staff visit Question/ Answer sites like Yahoo answers or Quora, Find people asking questions about furniture and have your staff answer it. You cna leave a link to your website when it's appropriate. Otherwise mentioning your store is good too.


That should keep them busy for a while. If you need more suggestions let me know.

The point is to have your staff go online and interact with your target audience. Plain and simple.

Almost forgot to mention social media.... posting links to your website with social posts is a fantastic way to gain popularity as well.

Harold Mansfield
09-11-2015, 08:34 PM
Honestly, I see this the same as saying "Hey Bob, go out on the floor and grab 4 employees to do the company's online marketing".
Seriously, if you take a bunch of carpenters and make them your SEO team nothing good can come out of it.

Who's in charge? Who's the person that has a working knowledge of SEO and online marketing?
Are you seriously going to just wing it with a few bullet points of information for something as important as your brand name online, recognition, reputation and sales?

Would you grab your web guy and let him fill custom couch orders?

MikeSweeney
09-12-2015, 07:27 AM
Everyone makes good points here.

I think it would be a good idea to have employee's do SEO work. But you will need to educate them in Online Marketing.

Profitlabs did list some actions your staff could do. The points others are trying to make is understanding and knowing the "why" and "how" behind it.

I would invest in some training they could follow along, learn and implement. Develop systems and procedures for you lead generation and customer conversions.

Who is going to follow up with people and how needs to be included.

fullflavor
09-12-2015, 11:51 AM
I would suggest that they spend some time on Seo forums such as
SEO Chat Forums (http://forums.seochat.com/)
Search Engine Watch Forums  - Search Engine Watch (#SEW) (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/)

dewalds86
09-14-2015, 06:00 AM
Why not have your employees spend time learning SEO and then applying what they learn? SEO isn't something where you follow a list of tasks, especially without any understanding of what you're doing. You're just as likely to do things in a way that causes harm than does any good.



Unless you created brand new sites for each of these locations, they're part of the existing site and so not new as far as search engines are concerned.

I dont think it is necessary to create different sites for different locations. It would be better to create landing pages for each location and optimize each landing page for that location.

As far as simple task are concerned the employees can share the pages of the different sofa products on social media and they can participate on other similar blogs about sofas, home decorating ect

I had a breif look at the site and the meta titles need work as far as seo is concerned. Fortunately the site is a wordpress site so not to difficult to learn

cbscreative
09-16-2015, 02:52 PM
Some of the advice here is to the point of hilarious. Let's put this in context. The business is custom sofas. Who buys custom sofas? Isn't it people who want something more than a mass produced superstore sofa they can plan on looking like crap after only a few years? Do you think they will be won over by "Look Ma I did it myself" online marketing?

Those of us in this industry (marketing) are plenty used to the widely held myth that buying the Adobe Creative Suite makes everyone an artist or installing WordPress makes everyone a web designer. Since so many people actually believe such nonsense, it isn't surprising that 80% of businesses fail. Follow the crowd and you fall off the cliff with them.

I like the analogy that WordPress makes everyone a web designer about as much as hammers make everyone a carpenter.

Then again, I'm just an industry insider perceived as hawking my own wares. That's okay, I'm perfectly happy working with the 20% and having them as long term clients. The rest will go on their merry way toward becoming a statistic with more to take their place when they're gone. I resolved long ago not to worry about what I cannot change.

Harold Mansfield
09-16-2015, 03:50 PM
Those of us in this industry (marketing) are plenty used to the widely held myth that buying the Adobe Creative Suite makes everyone an artist or installing WordPress makes everyone a web designer. Since so many people actually believe such nonsense, it isn't surprising that 80% of businesses fail. Follow the crowd and you fall off the cliff with them.

I like the analogy that WordPress makes everyone a web designer about as much as hammers make everyone a carpenter.

Exactly. If that were true I would be broke.

I think people confuse the ease of accessing information on the web, with assuming that the web makes everything easy. They keep leaving out the part in the middle where you still have to learn and know what you're doing.

dewalds86
09-21-2015, 06:55 AM
Exactly. If that were true I would be broke.

I think people confuse the ease of accessing information on the web, with assuming that the web makes everything easy. They keep leaving out the part in the middle where you still have to learn and know what you're doing.

Brilliant analogy. I almost fell of my chair laughing.

dewalds86
09-21-2015, 07:08 AM
Some of the advice here is to the point of hilarious. Let's put this in context. The business is custom sofas. Who buys custom sofas? Isn't it people who want something more than a mass produced superstore sofa they can plan on looking like crap after only a few years? Do you think they will be won over by "Look Ma I did it myself" online marketing?

Those of us in this industry (marketing) are plenty used to the widely held myth that buying the Adobe Creative Suite makes everyone an artist or installing WordPress makes everyone a web designer. Since so many people actually believe such nonsense, it isn't surprising that 80% of businesses fail. Follow the crowd and you fall off the cliff with them.

I like the analogy that WordPress makes everyone a web designer about as much as hammers make everyone a carpenter.

Then again, I'm just an industry insider perceived as hawking my own wares. That's okay, I'm perfectly happy working with the 20% and having them as long term clients. The rest will go on their merry way toward becoming a statistic with more to take their place when they're gone. I resolved long ago not to worry about what I cannot change.

Brilliant analogy. Of course installing Wordpress doesn't make you a web designer. However this is slightly of topic.

All the guy wants to know is there some basic SEO tasks that he can give his employees to help market the business.

I agree that they wont have the skill to do on page seo such as editing meta data and doing proper keyword research even if it is a Wordpress website.

But still there are some of page marketing that they can do such as social media sharing.

I agree by sharing the content that is on the site wont boost their SERP rankings but it will increase brand awareness and bring in some new visitors to the site.

I am sure at least some of his employees have Facebook or twitter accounts.

I will go as far as to recommend that any business should recommend to their employees to share the contents of their site on social media.

cbscreative
09-21-2015, 01:32 PM
Brilliant analogy. Of course installing Wordpress doesn't make you a web designer. However this is slightly of topic.

It's not really off topic, your opening use of the word analogy is accurate, that's all it was.

The idea of DIY marketing is what I find amusing. SEO can be done in house if you're willing to learn it and avoid bad advice which is given out very liberally in a lot of places.

I'm not arguing the idea of employees doing social marketing but even then, there are pitfalls which is why professional services are available for social media management. There's no shortage of social media blunders being made and I have no doubt some of them have been made by hired service providers. I would venture a guess a lot more of them are from employees tasked with the job or bosses who thought they'd try their hand at it.

Questions remain if employees are being asked to manage social media. What control factors are in place? Who is overseeing what does and does not get shared? What rules and guidelines are being used? Are agreements between the business and customers clear if "projects" are being posted on social media? Most customers will be honored to be featured but never make that assumption.

It's great that the question was asked. That's part of the reason this forum exists. He hasn't responded so far but he's certainly got a lot more to think about before deciding a course of action. I'd call that a successful thread.

thesofaking
09-22-2015, 07:52 PM
Thank you for all the feedback. I agree SEO and social media marketing is not something that just anyone can pick up in a few hours. At the same point there are some basic things that my staff can be doing as dewalds86 pointed. If anything I think I would hire an SEO or social media expert to help us put together a game plan to execute so we are not shooting in the dark. I just wanted to get opinions on this and see if you guys had any suggestions. I appreciate all the feedback. Thanks again.

janefirst
10-07-2015, 07:53 AM
Seo whether it is paid or organic would be useful for your website. If would help to optimize your information to sell your products through your website. Optimization could be done by your staff and it would help your business. You should follow webmaster guidelines and white hat techniques for on page and off page optimization. It is good that you will rebuild your site for getting mobile responsive site. Mobile responsive site would support your business entirely. Keep your site as a low weight site, fast to download and avoid uploading too big images on it, because such images are not good for good performance of your site. Upload small and optimized images in it.

thesofaking
10-07-2015, 05:55 PM
Seo whether it is paid or organic would be useful for your website. If would help to optimize your information to sell your products through your website. Optimization could be done by your staff and it would help your business. You should follow webmaster guidelines and white hat techniques for on page and off page optimization. It is good that you will rebuild your site for getting mobile responsive site. Mobile responsive site would support your business entirely. Keep your site as a low weight site, fast to download and avoid uploading too big images on it, because such images are not good for good performance of your site. Upload small and optimized images in it.

Thank you for your feedback and advice. Quick question, do you have a site you could suggest to help learn white hat techniques that I could teach my staff?

Brian Davis
10-29-2015, 11:11 AM
If your employees don't have any knowledge or experience in SEO field, than it'd be great for the to learn. But in addition to it you can tell them to write some articles including keywords for your site (or blog if you have). Also they can submit your website to different directories or catalogs.

Oliversmith901
11-03-2015, 01:29 AM
I think too it would be a good idea to have employee's do SEO work. But employees must at least have an basic idea of an web development & online marketing.because SEO divided into two categories as on-page & off-page.There all so having several techniques which relevant to those two types as well.you better to find those new techniques.

bmell
12-21-2015, 05:32 PM
We created an SEO Keyword Recommendations Tool (https://www.bannerview.com/seo-recommendations/). You could have your staff come up with a list of keywords for which you want to rank well. Run them through the tool and make some adjustments. Feel free to provide us with any feedback on the tool.

dewalds86
12-22-2015, 06:53 AM
Cant believe this thread is still going. Has the guy who originally posted this thread ever responded?