WIB: Your website talks about the important of growing a website and keeping it fresh by having a content plan. How often should people update their websites or blogs if they want to stay competitive in search engines?
Campbell: As often as possible. Having a good content plan is essential for the success of a website. I know many SEOs that will not work with a client if they won't commit to a content plan. The Google crawler thrives on unique original content published consistently. Every time you publish, Google gets a "ping" asking the crawler to come back and visit your site. The challenge, especially for small business owners, is that they want to do it, but they are very busy running their business. Part of the content plan should be a realistic assessment of whether the site owner can write the content, or if they should hire a copywriter to help them. I've found some amazing copywriters to help me with my clients and even my own website, at very reasonable costs.
WIB: Tell me about training courses you will soon be offering.
Campbell: I have three training courses right now, along with a membership site, which is a community of web consultants and DIY small business owners all learning, helping each other out and referring business to each other. We call it the Expand2Web Experts Group
Here are the online courses we've been delivering:
- Building and Customizing Your WordPress Website: In this 4 week course students start from scratch and by the end they have a fully functioning WordPress website and know how to build more of them.
- The Circle of Trust Local SEO process: We've built an effective method for getting results for small businesses called the Circle of Trust SEO process. In this course we teach how to implement this proven process, which includes website optimization, content strategy, online reviews, local profile optimization, and link and citation building for small business websites.
- A Social Media Blueprint for Small Business Owners: In this course we teach how to leverage Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for small businesses. We actually build a business Facebook Page with custom tabs, and share our templates.
The courses have been a big hit - our students are coming out and building websites, Facebook pages, and doing SEO projects to help small business owners succeed online. The best part for me, is building a community of like-minded folks that can all help each other to succeed. I'm very excited about where this is going!
Don Campbell created Expand2Web to help small business owners build WordPress websites that rank in the top of local search results on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Now Expand2Web creates training and tools for consultants and do-it-yourself small business owners.
