If you own a business and as part of that process, have built a website, listen up. I want to tell you about a simplified way of doing online marketing and lead generation. This “understanding” will save you hours of time and frustration. It will also insulate you from unnecessary expense in seeking to make it work.

For years you’ve been told that Google is looking for you to monitor 200 or more things. This will qualify your site’s online marketing to get traffic from Google. Right?

What if I told you that this just isn’t true? While there are a number of things to pay attention to, you really only need 3-4 to get solid results.

Let’s talk truth here. First and most important to your online business success is VISIBILITY. Your ideal prospect has a problem they’re trying to solve. They’ll go online to research potential solutions. In that process they’ll be offered a variety of business websites to help them. If your site isn’t one of them, you are not only invisible, but for all purposes you don’t exist.

If they don’t see you, they can’t choose you. One of your competitors will win the lead generation opportunity and maybe even the sale.

So work intently to get visibility in search so that you can move to step 2 of the internet marketing process.

What is step two? If you’re visible when I search, the next thing I’ll need is PROOF that you are who you say you are and have testimonials that prove it.

Ideally you want to get as many reviews as possible so that proof of your work exists wherever I choose to look. Google? Yes, for sure. Facebook? A great place to get reviews. On the BBB site, yes – if they called because of your BBB profile, send them back there to leave a review.

Lesser sites include Yelp, Instagram and even on your website.

I had a client for several years that started at 13 Google reviews. We devised a process to make leaving a review easy and now he has more than 500 reviews there. On his website he has 600 more.

Many of your competitors will have hundreds too. Your prospective clients will want and need to see proof of excellence before they choose to contact you for anything.

With step one of visibility completed, and step two of lots of proof accomplished, you often get invited by your prospect to move to step three.

If either of the first 2 steps isn’t done, the game is over. You don’t get a lot of opportunities to go further.

What is step three? Step 3 is your sales process. A universal truth of selling is that your prospects LOVE to buy but rarely want to be SOLD. They prefer that you, in a gentle, thorough, way answer all of their questions and make it easy for them to get involved.

Other factors you may want to have analyzed and some of those might need to be fixed, but move quickly to do them and stay focused on your goal. The main ones are that you test your mobile website speed. It’s big in the Google plan. Others include the content on your site must be unique, and the images on your site must be from your own work. No stock photos. Last on my list of extras is that in your online profile ensure that the address and phone information be consistent everywhere it appears. This proves that you are who you said you are.

If your business depends on it’s online marketing you can get caught up in what Google suggests which is a list of roughly 200 things to pay attention to to make your site work, or you can focus on three. You choose