Being Findable Somewhere Other Than Search

Count the concentration first

Go through your last thirty enquiries and note where each came from.

Search, your listing, referral, repeat, social, advertising, signage, or somebody who had your card.

The share coming from the largest single source is the number that matters here.

Above about two thirds, you have a concentration worth addressing, and most small businesses are above it without knowing.

What the exposure actually is

• An algorithm change you did not cause.
• Results presented differently.
• A listing suspended in error.
• A competitor outspending you.
• Costs rising on a paid channel.

The third is the one that happens most and is discussed least. A listing suspended over a category dispute or a suspected duplicate can take weeks to restore, during which a business dependent on it has no enquiries at all.

The channels available to a small business

Which is a shorter list than the general advice suggests.

Repeat work, which is the cheapest and most neglected.

Referral, from customers and from adjacent trades.

An email list, which you own outright.

Local presence: signage, vehicles, sponsorship, and being known.

And one social platform where your customers actually are, if there is one.

Most businesses could build any two of those and have built none, because each is slower than improving the site.

Adjacent trades are the underused one

Since it is the highest return for the least effort.

The trades that work before and after you on the same jobs are talking to your customers at the right moment.

A relationship with three of them, where you refer work both ways, produces enquiries that arrive already trusting you.

That requires meeting them, doing them a favour first, and being reliable, which is a quarter's work rather than a campaign.

It is also entirely outside anybody else's control, which is the property this whole subject is about.

Most small businesses can name the three and have never had the conversation.

A worked example

A business found that twenty-six of their last thirty enquiries had come through search and their listing.

Their listing was suspended in March over a category dispute and took five weeks to restore.

Enquiries in that period fell by roughly three quarters and they had no other route.

Afterwards they started asking past customers for referrals directly, built a small list from their invoice records, and established a reciprocal arrangement with two adjacent trades.

A year later the largest single source was about half rather than nearly all.

Total enquiries also rose, which was not the objective and is the usual outcome.

Repeat work is the cheapest channel

And is neglected because it does not feel like marketing.

A past customer already trusts you, knows your prices, and needs no persuading.

Most trades have work that recurs on a cycle, and almost none contact people when the cycle comes round.

A list of past customers with the date and the job, and a note to contact them at the right interval, is the whole system.

That is a spreadsheet and an hour, and it outperforms most of what is discussed in this blog.

Build one, not four

Since the failure is attempting all of them.

Pick the one that fits how you actually work and give it a year.

A tradesperson who dislikes writing should not choose an email list, and somebody with no time to meet people should not choose referral relationships.

Choose by what you will actually keep doing, since every one of these works if maintained and none works if abandoned in March.

One additional channel at a third of your enquiries is a completely different position from none.

Recount annually

Which is the measurement.

Thirty enquiries sorted by source, once a year, in the same document as everything else.

That tells you whether the concentration is falling and whether the year's effort produced anything.

Asking people directly is the only reliable method, since attribution misses referral and repeat entirely.

And it takes about twenty minutes.

Being known is a channel too

Which is easy to dismiss because it cannot be measured cleanly.

Vehicles with a legible name, a sign on the job, and a presence at the same handful of local events produce a slow accumulation of recognition.

That shows up later as branded searches, as people saying they had seen you around, and as referrals from people you never worked for.

It is the oldest channel available to a trade and the one least affected by anything discussed this year.

A van that nobody can read the number on is the most common wasted version of it, which is worth checking on your own vehicles this week.

Ask past customers directly

The fastest way to start, since it needs no audience and no platform.

Go through your customers from the last two years and contact the ones you would happily work for again, asking whether they know anybody who needs the same thing.

That is an uncomfortable message to send and it works, because somebody satisfied with your work usually does know somebody and has simply never been asked.

Twenty messages produces a handful of leads and, more usefully, reminds twenty people that you exist at a moment when they might need you again.

Do it once a year rather than repeatedly, and only to people whose work went well, since asking somebody dissatisfied is worse than not asking.

The counter-case

Concentration is not always wrong.

A channel that works well deserves investment, and spreading effort thinly across five produces five weak ones.

For some trades search genuinely is where customers are and building a presence elsewhere is effort with no audience.

And a very small business may not have capacity for more enquiries anyway, which changes the calculation entirely.

Count your last thirty enquiries by source, and if one is above two thirds, pick one additional channel and give it a year.

The count

1. List your last thirty enquiries.
2. Note the source of each.
3. Work out the largest share.
4. Act if it is above two thirds.
5. Pick one channel you will maintain.
6. Start with repeat or adjacent trades.
7. Recount in a year.

Step six is where the return is fastest, since past customers and the trades working alongside you require no audience-building and are already talking to the right people.

The general version of this risk is covered in betting a business on a platform you do not own.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.