Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an often quoted but frequently misunderstood term. It’s often mistakenly dismissed as being some sort of unfathomable pseudoscience, and so some businesses are failing to take advantage of the many business benefits of SEO. These can include increased brand visibility, enhanced credibility and improved levels of traffic to your website. In this article we put forward five reasons as to why your business should consider SEO as part of an overall marketing strategy.

Increased brand visibility

Most searchers when using a search engine to look for a service or product don’t just simply search once, click on some websites and be done with it. The reality is that most searchers edit and refine their search terms and click on a number of websites before further honing their search terms and searching again.  As a business, you don’t just want to be at the top of the search results for one of those searches; ideally your business should be near the top for all related searches. By continually featuring in these search results, your business will be gaining more and more mindshare with each potential customer. The chances will then be very good that they will eventually click through to your website.

Enhanced credibility

Continually showing up in search results will also help to improve a potential customer’s level of trust in your brand. Subconsciously, searchers make mental notes of the rankings when they search on Google or other search engines. High search rankings will make you more credible in their eyes and act as a vote of confidence.

Improved levels of website traffic

Increased levels of traffic to your website by itself will not make you money. By the law of averages, however, the more potential customers you have visiting your website, the more conversions you will make. You will still need to make your best efforts once they are on your website, but the chances are that improved levels of traffic will in turn positively impact on your conversion rate.

Return on investment

It’s a fact that SEO will reward your business for its efforts at a higher rate than more traditional forms of advertising. That’s because it’s an inbound form of marketing: you are marketing to people when they are looking for the products and services that your business provides. In other words you are not convincing them that they need your product or service; you just have to convince them that your offering is better than any others in the marketplace. And so with SEO half the battle is won before it’s even started.

Customer insight

The final reason why your business should include SEO in its marketing strategy is because of the insights it will provide into the habits and activities of your customers. Google Analytics, along with similar search engine traffic analysis tools, provide detailed and valuable information on potential customers: how they search, how they browse, where they live, as well as the days and time that they are most active. This sort of detailed customer data, as well as being a free resource for businesses, will be invaluable in terms of helping you to make informed decisions about your business and its strategies.

So if you’re one of those people that thought SEO was a pseudoscience, then it may be time to rethink your approach and take advantage of the undeniable benefits SEO has to offer.

What’s a season in business?

Seasons in business aren’t actually that different from seasons in terms of climate. Often the weather actually does play a significant role in how well your business will operate. For example, ice cream parlors will do much better in summer than in winter. The difference is that seasons in the context of business can be contingent on things other than just the weather.

Any condition that affects your business, your clients, your suppliers, or even the public in general can have an effect on your business. For example, if you’re working with American clients you’ll find that it can be difficult to get new contracts or to get paid on time early in the year, because budgets are always tight while clients try to finalise their taxes for the previous year. It’s a good idea to plan for restricted cash flow during that time period to avoid being blindsided by unforeseen payment issues.

Identifying and planning for your seasons

Because the success of any business relies on so many different factors, there’s no business we’ve ever seen that doesn’t deal with seasonal changes in cashflow and general efficacy. The key to ensuring that you can weather the storm, is to identify the seasons that affect your business, and to plan ahead for them.

Predicting your business’ seasons can be difficult to do perfectly, but you’ll be able to build a decent outline by examining two key factors: Direct, and indirect conditions.

Direct conditions

Determine what context your business requires to operate, and work to figure out what predictable events can disrupt that context. Some likely culprits to think about might be:

• Shifts in climate and weather can halt outside work, interfere with shipping, or affect your equipment
• Major holidays like Christmas drive demand for a lot of related goods, but can also interfere with client communications and worker focus
• Flu season can interfere with productivity in crowded workplaces where viruses are easily spread
• Tourism season can bring in customers for related businesses, while also reducing demand for other services as local homeowners leave to go on their own vacations
• Large customers who demand extended payment terms, leading to relatively long ‘dry seasons’ between payments.

Indirect conditions

Indirect conditions are ones that interfere with your suppliers or your customers. Anything that gets in the way of someone related to your business can have a knock on effect on your own operation. Some things to watch out for might be:

• Suppliers facing seasonal production slow-downs might cause delays in deliveries
• Bad weather that discourages pedestrian traffic if you rely on walk-in customers
• Local bureaucratic issues that might affect an international customer.

Once you’ve figured out what to expect, you can start working to ensure that you’re prepared when trouble comes.

Getting prepared

Seasonal fluctuations can positively or negatively affect your business; the problem is unreliable cash flow. To succeed as a small or medium sized business, you absolutely need to plan ahead. Once you have an idea of what seasons your business is affected by, you’ll be able to figure out why you’re having a particularly good or particularly bad month. Here are a few important ways to do so.

Work with your financial partners

Besides working with lenders, it’s important to communicate with suppliers, clients, accountants, banks, and the ATO (Australian Tax Office) or Inland Revenue Department (IRD) in New Zealand. These relationships can help you anticipate and potentially deal with financial issues without being forced to take out a loan by simply negotiating for an adapted and manageable payment schedule.

Open a line of credit

One good way to be prepared for seasonal cash flow issues that you can’t simply avoid is to get a serviceable line of credit. These work differently from regular bank loans, and offer a flexible means of providing the low-interest credit you need to keep the doors open in the short term.

Labour management

In some cases your business might operate at a relatively low capacity throughout most of the year, and expect a massive spike in demand around a specific time of year. Taking proper advantage of this flush season means ensuring that you can quickly acquire adequately trained temporary labour for the duration, whether that means outsourcing, paying for overtime, or building a relationship with a temp agency. If you see it coming ahead of time, you can form the relationships you need with the appropriate contractors ahead of time, and ensure that the process goes smoothly when the time comes.

Keeping the doors open and your business growing in an inherently unstable environment can be tricky, but managing it well will ultimately make the difference between your business, and your less adaptive competitors.

One of biggest issues with managing incoming payments is keeping track of them all closely enough to quickly notice when problems occur. If there’s a problem with the invoice, the client didn’t receive it, or they are deliberately ignoring it, it can often take multiple follow-ups, phone calls, and sometimes legal action to rectify the situation.

These issues are exacerbated when you have to actively remember to follow up every few days to chase down the delinquent client. Many small businesses rely on collections agencies to deal with these problems, but those are expensive, they destroy client relationships, and take time to deliver results.

Late payments are always bad for business

Even if your business has the financial flexibility to survive late payments, it can still have very negative impacts that go well beyond just being irritating. Even if you can pay your workers and buy the supplies you need to operate, you’ll be missing financial capital that you could be using to ramp up marketing, pay for research and development, or push other growth factors that have a long term impact on the health of your business.

How accounting software can help

Accounting software like Xero exists to provide tools to small businesses that make it much easier to personally deal with the financial issues of your business on a daily basis. In terms of getting paid, that means invoice management. There are a few ways that Xero specifically works to help you get paid more reliably and more quickly.

Preventing invoicing issues proactively

Xero allows you to instantly send invoices via mobile device, and also allows your clients to pay for an invoice with the click of a button. Simple convenience can make an enormous difference, and goes a long way toward preventing administrative excuses from clients who try to blame late payments on internal bureaucratic issues. This way conversations about payment are likely to be more honest and revolve around real reasons why payment hasn’t been made.

Something else that shouldn’t be ignored is that accounting and invoicing software helps you to generate and issue highly professional looking invoices. While they’re legally the same as anything you can put together yourself, the look of your invoice and the impression that it gives can have an enormous impact on how highly it’ll be prioritised by a client who is trying to deal with their own financial issues.

Invoice management

Xero allows you to see whether your client has viewed your invoice after you issue it. Having that extra bit of information can be a vital tool for predicting what the problem might be on the client end. If the client doesn’t see it, you can immediately investigate to make sure that the invoice made it to your client in the first place. You’ll be able to avoid situations where mistyped emails or overzealous spam filters get in the way of timely payments.

If the client does view the invoice and doesn’t immediately pay, you’ll know to call and enquire if there was another problem that needs to be addressed. You’ll be able to behave proactively instead of being forced to rely on delayed signals from your client.

In dealing with clients who are already late, Xero provides support by allowing you to set three automatic follow-up reminders per invoice. This way you can rest assured that nothing is slipping through the cracks, and that you’re always on top of any developing situations with your debtors.

Developing Professional Consistency

By the time you get through all three reminders, you’ll know for certain that you’re dealing with a more serious issue that’ll require further action. Since you scheduled the follow-ups ahead of time, you and your client will both know what’s coming, and when. Besides simply being a professional way to handle things, this gives you a reliable schedule that you can use to hold clients responsible without turning payment issues into personal conflicts.

You’ll be able to ensure that your revenue streams and your response to payment interruptions are more consistent and reliable than they would be if you try to handle everything manually. This way you can spend less time worrying about money, and focus more on growing your business.

Accounting has come a long way since it first kickstarted the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia, but the biggest changes to how accounting works have only just occurred in the last few years, and they’re still evolving today.

Accounting and the cloud

Technology has brought about a lot of change in the accounting world over the past few years. It has increasingly given businesses better control of their finances, and given them more tools to manipulate and apply their accounting data.

The introduction of cloud-based accounting has revolutionised bookkeeping. Computers made it easy to modify and recalculate existing data compared to our grandparents’ pen-and-calculator powered accounting tools, but the cloud has made it possible to automate the entire system.

Cloud-based accounting systems like Xero, MYOB, Quickbooks, and others can automatically track bank account transactions in real time, manage and track payroll and other costs, calculate taxes, and generate regular reports without the risk of human error. Today it’s possible to know everything there is to know about your business’ financial situation at a glance, on any day of the week, month, or year.

The new world of accounting

These changes have created two distinct accountant groups who seek to apply these new tools for slightly different purposes. The type of accountant you and your business choose to engage is a matter of personal preference, just as the goals that you have for your business are.

Advanced Bookkeeping

The first group is what we’ll refer to as advanced bookkeepers. These tend to be smaller accounting firms that keep everything in order and up to date for you. They can track what you’ve done through Xero (or whatever other software you’re using) and help to produce your end of year reports and GST (Goods & Services Tax).

They’re focused on helping you reach compliance and are the ideal choice for business owners who are looking for a way to spend less time thinking about their business’ accounting, and more on running everyday operations. That’s not to say larger corporations don’t or shouldn’t work with these firms. In fact, many sizeable businesses prefer to handle higher order accounting concerns in-house due to privacy concerns, or out of a general discomfort with outsourcing these kinds of tasks.

Applied Accounting

The second group of accountants has moved away from a compliance focus and grown into a more forward-looking advisory and strategic role. They work with their clients to address higher order concerns like enterprise risk management, actuarial consulting, and insurance management. These are usually structured practices, and range in size from small 5-person teams up to the big four accounting firms.

Accountants analyze client data in real time and apply their experience and expertise to make recommendations to their clients. Larger firms, especially Deloitte, PWC, KPMG, and Ernst & Young, are increasingly experimenting with and developing ways to leverage the enormous amount of data they have access to in order to bring big data computing to bear for their clients.

On the horizon: big data in accounting

The introduction of big data into accounting is still ongoing, and its effects are promising to be extremely significant. Big data has transformed everything it touched, from marketing to mass government surveillance. Accountants have only recently begun looking at it as a possible resource, largely because ignoring it any longer could threaten their entire industry and relegate them back to the realm of simple bean-counting.

The secret to its success is that it allows us to analyse a vast amount of unstructured information. “Unstructured” isn’t just expedient, it’s also significant because it means that we can find unexpected patterns that could otherwise be obscured by the very act of sorting and partitioning the data. By analysing not only accounting data, but also marketing, sales, and consumer data, these firms will be able to integrate and apply their accounting expertise to every aspect of your business from marketing to purchasing, to overall production and performance.

This new service isn’t just accounting anymore, it’s a symbiotic business intelligence partnership. It will allow businesses to optimise their operations as never before. Not only will financial oversight be effortless, businesses will have much more advanced abilities to detect fraud, to budget for the future, and to develop low-risk/high-reward growth strategies.

Accounting is changing rapidly, and it’ll be fascinating to see how the field continues to develop and integrate with other aspects of client operations over the coming years.