Studio Cotton founder Aime asked me to write this blog post, because while doing content entry for clients’ new websites – stuff like popping clients on their rosters, guests on podcasts, businesses for recommendations pages – it’s been hard to find enough of the right information.
It can be a real struggle to find the basic info that allows us to add other small businesses to our websites, which means they could miss out on yummy backlinks (which are great for search engine optimisation (SEO)) and could also result in not getting into features at all.
Small businesses don’t have a lot of spare time to email other small business owners to find that information, and I’m going to guess you don’t have a whole load of time to provide that information over and over again in reply.
So here are all the things you need to have on your small business website to make easy it for those peeps who desperately want to feature you, and save allllll that time for better things, like drinking a cool can of fizzy pop in the park on a sunny day.
1. The location of your small business
We like to include location information on websites because local SEO is freakin’ awesome. However, sometimes we don’t actually know where a small business is based, even after viewing their about page, contact page, and even the terms & conditions page.
At the time of writing some notes for this post, Aime had been looking at wedding photographers’ websites, in order to add links to a wedding-related website. Out of 8 websites, she only found a location on 2 of them. Two. TWO. 1/4. 25%.
All you need to do is pop a “proudly based in X” to your website footer, and make sure it’s easy to spot on your about and contact pages.
This is extra important if locality is important to your business (like, for example, if you’re a wedding photographer, rather than an online pet shop) it needs to be mega prominent, so chuck it on all of your website pages.
2. Names of the humans behind your small business
We want to know your name, and it’s not just because we’re incredibly nosy.
Adding your name(s) to your website means we can properly attribute quotes and chat about real people – and people love real people.
It’ll help potential customers to build brand affinity with you, which basically means an emotional connection between customer and brand, making them want to stay loyal to your small business.
The names of the people who help run your small business need to be on the about page, and if it’s a person-led business (like if you’re a freelance copywriter or an independent jewellery designer) ideally the home page too.
3. Any lovely sustainability information
If we’re writing about small business sustainability, we need to know how a business is actually sustainable.
It’s all well and good chucking “sustainable” or “ethical” on your website, but give us the nitty-gritty, yell about all the super lovely stuff you’re doing in your small business, and bang on about how you’re being kinder to our planet.
Create a sustainability page with all the sustainable credentials, information and good deeds you’re doing, and pop a link to it in your website footer. We also recommend dotting that sustainability info everywhere on your website, to really make it obvious how nice you are.
4. Whether your business is actually small
In Aime’s recent SEO workshop with 91 Magazine (which is still available for replay) she included a slide about all the small businesses that ranked for “gold smiley face necklace,” and got 5 results from brand names she didn’t recognise.
She could tell for sure they were small or independent brands. Do you know how? Because they didn’t write it down anywhere.
Yep. not saying they were a small or independent business was actually the giveaway that they are. A bit of an oxymoron. You’re not a moron for overlooking the obvious though – it’s very easily done.
Customers love buying from a small business, and fellow business owners like us want to feature you if you’re small, so pop this essential information your website’s about page, and a mini bio in your website footer would be cute too – something like “proudly independent” works well.
5. Details of how to access photos
If we’re writing about you, chances are we’ll want to include a photo or two, and I knowwww we’re not going to be the only ones. Photos add context to our blog posts, help potential customers create a connection, and they’re just fun for our eyes to look at.
If you’d like magazines, blogs or other small businesses to write about you, make it obvious where to find your small biz photos that they can use.
We’ve made it really clear on our Media & press page how those photos can be used too – for example, pls don’t airbrush our already perfect faces.
6. A nice, big, transparent PNG of your logo
Extra bonus points if you provide it in a brand colour, plus black and white – it’s handy to have that choice, so that there’s something for every website.
Aime says she has missed so many blogs and podcasts off websites because she couldn’t find a suitable logo. Maybe pop that PNG logo in that same place as the photos you’ve made accessible in point 5.
At Studio Cotton we loooove being featured, partly for the SEO and new clients that might result from it, but also because we thrive on attention. So we made it wildly easy.
Aime created our Media & press page specifically to make it easy-as-pies for people to write about us – with a business bio, a bullet-point list of tid-bits, access to our image assets, a section about how Aime can contribute to podcasts, panels and more, plus a way to contact us if they need a lil somethin’ extra, we’ve got it all covered.
So if you wanna feature us… you know exactly what to do.
