Escaping SEO and Amazon: The Online Transformation/Survival Guide for Small Businesses

By Jatin Patro

This 200+ page book serves as a guide for small businesses struggling to find relevance online. It highlights the current threats and challenges online, offers a structured approach to navigating the online noise and succeeding online, and offers a vision for small businesses and their communities to seamlessly come together online into local alternatives to Google and Amazon, and harness the power of communities to counter the threat.

Online technology has revolutionized commerce, from megabrands to local stores. But if independent businesses want to counter the growing challenges and threats, they need to innovate, adapt, and collaborate online. Escaping SEO and Amazon challenges the status quo and offers a fresh breath of hope for small businesses and their communities, through the introduction of a transformative platform and a prescription for success.

Jatin Patro, business owner and pioneer of the next generation website, e-commerce, and community platform SharedMall highlights challenges small businesses face, builds the case for an online transformation, prescribes a reference infrastructure, and offers practical solutions for independent proprietors to thrive online today and in the future. In Escaping SEO and Amazon, he shows you how to readily overcome your technology, time, and cost constraints and contend in the digital economy with minimal money and technical expertise. Jatin presents actionable solutions that you can implement independently, using his SharedFACT model, and collectively, through collaborative communities.

With creativity and cooperation, small businesses can level the online playing field, compete more effectively, and take back control in the digital sphere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781544503127

Book preview

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Copyright © 2019 Jatin Patro

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5445-0312-7

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To all the small businesses that make a community unique; to BALLE, AMIBA, and ILSR for fostering stronger communities; and to all my fellow entrepreneurs who strive to make a positive difference in the world

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Disclaimer

Introduction

Part I: Problems Faced Today

1. Current Unfavorable Trends

2. Challenges and Hurdles

3. A Prescription for Success

Part II: Innovation Prescription for Online Success

4. Find

5. Assess

6. Choose

7. Transact

Part III: Harnessing the Collective Power of Communities

8. Standardization and Collaboration

9. Demanding Change

Conclusion

About the Author

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Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the hundreds of small-business owners and community advocates whose unique perspectives, challenges, and threats have encouraged me to build the case for an online transformation and to offer the prescription.

My wife, Rachna, and our children, Tiara and Sanjh, are my daily dose of happiness and my motivation for completing this book and succeeding in everything I do.

Marji Graf, president and CEO of Rockville Chamber of Commerce, has been instrumental in shaping my community perspective that’s outlined in this book.

Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge Scribe Media, and in particular my scribe, Jeannette de Beauvoir, without whose help this book would not have been possible.

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Disclaimer

This book contains references to various third-party companies and products. All referenced trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners. All content concerning various companies, software platforms, and solutions is provided to the best of the author’s knowledge, without any guarantees, and should not be construed as endorsement or acknowledgment from any third party.

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Introduction

The Threat

My young daughter recently started her first business. She sells a custom homemade toy called slime, a viscous, colorful substance popular with kids. Her primary motivation is to help her favorite nonprofit, the Gorilla Foundation, through donations. A secondary goal is to prepare for college by earning $20,000 in five years through her entrepreneurial effort. It’s a good start for a young entrepreneur with charitable intentions, and I helped her with her business registration and built her a basic website to sell her product online.

The result was Sunstreak Slimes, a company based in Oregon.

She formally launched her products during a holiday bazaar at her school. We were pleasantly surprised to find hers was the most popular of all vendor spots at the market, and as a bonus, an attendee asked her to cover a birthday party.

Success at the bazaar validated her business model and the demand for her products, and made her enthusiastic about taking it online. I managed to place one of her products, Avalanche Slime, on the first page of Google’s search results, gave her a crash course on online success, and left her to take it from there. It was an opportunity for her to experience, firsthand, the real-world challenges of running a business.

Days, weeks, and months passed. Her site wasn’t updated regularly, her ranking for Avalanche Slime slipped, and her impact was as good as nonexistent. I love making slime but not writing about it, she explained.

Schoolwork has to consume most of any child’s waking hours, and beyond that is a constant tug-of-war between family time and personal time—and no time for boring content updates, especially to a website that already has enough content to guide the visitor in making a purchase.

If my daughter sells exclusively at local markets, she has a real chance of making her five-year goal. Farmers’ markets, downtown markets, and local markets in general are steadily growing in number because they embrace the time-tested values of localism in a true community sense. There’s a sense of belonging in such markets, with interactive conversations and high levels of confidence in buying and selling.

On the other hand, if my daughter confines herself to selling at local markets, there won’t be time for schoolwork, family activities, or any of the other components to a balanced childhood. That’s simply not acceptable. So there’s little choice but to take her business online, and the online representation of her as a vendor is her website. That doesn’t mean that she won’t still be targeting local markets; she just needs to do it in a way that’s efficient.

The problem is that the internet doesn’t define local markets very clearly. The default position for online search isn’t local, but global. In order to target a local market online, vendors have to compete globally.

The practice of SEO, or search engine optimization—the online process through which vendors connect potential buyers to their products by luring web crawlers to their sites—is a moving target that has become a prerequisite for every business wanting to succeed online. To my mind, SEO should actually stand for search engine overhead, and it’s an expensive overhead that’s neither practical nor effective for the majority of small businesses, which consequently turn to paid services and advertisements, and those advertisements generally end up further draining resources and adding to the small businessperson’s struggle.

It’s not just search engines that pose a threat to local online businesses; the threat is also from online marketplaces, especially Amazon. Half of all online retail shoppers today skip search engines altogether and go directly to Amazon, reducing retailers’ ability to benefit from search engine optimization by more than half. Sellers on Amazon’s platform are essentially helping Amazon itself grow in exchange for a new sales channel—one that doesn’t offer any promise of success.

The threat from Amazon has traditionally been to small retailers, but as the corporate giant increasingly expands into local markets, the threat will soon be to independent service providers, restaurants, farms—just about every industry.

Many retailers have tried to become part of the Amazon success story, looking to share the pie that is Amazon’s market share. My daughter tried opening a seller account with Amazon, but the process dictated by Amazon to list her few products involved far more overhead than she could commit to.

Amazon is clearly not a solution. It’s part of the problem.

Online marketplaces, especially Amazon, are what pose a threat to small and local businesses.

The Small Business Dilemma

My daughter isn’t alone.

Online technology, trends, and innovation have evolved in favor of globalism while neglecting localism. In the current online landscape, small businesses are left with no choice online but to scramble and embrace the overhead of competing in an unfavorable global landscape, irrespective of their desire and ability to serve local customers.

Survival of the fittest is only fair if the playing field is level—and the online playing field is far from level. Current trends increasingly favor the biggest online players. When Google takes shoppers and puts them on a path that inevitably starts with big brand names, Google becomes a threat to smaller businesses. In an online landscape where even traditional large companies are losing relevance, what chance do independent small and local businesses have? Just as Amazon isn’t the solution, neither is SEO. Instead of investing more and more time, money, and effort into SEO, the best solution is to escape it altogether.

If SEO becomes irrelevant, then the playing field levels off. That doesn’t mean the process will be easy: the internet accepts Google’s and Amazon’s terms as normative, and change means challenging the status quo.

Survival of the fittest is only fair if the playing field is level.

As I studied the challenges and threats faced by small businesses across various industries, it became obvious that online technologies and trends are drifting further and further away from the ideal solution.

In the quest to help businesses transcend traditional local boundaries, the importance of local commerce has been neglected. In the quest to be recognized as the best website or e-commerce platform, aesthetic appeal is being prioritized over sales and efficiency. In the quest to develop the biggest and greatest marketplace, the essence of independent business brand is being sacrificed. In the quest to serve the largest number of independent businesses, the community strengths are being sacrificed. Website and e-commerce platform providers are failing to empower small and local businesses to harness their unique independent and community strengths online.

The more I thought about these problems, the more perplexed I became. There seemed to be a great deal of interest in local commerce, but, by and large, it hadn’t gravitated toward—or translated to—the internet.

I decided to find out why.

The Buy-Local Dilemma

Thousands of communities across the United States and Canada are focused on helping businesses sell and purchase goods and services locally. Whether the goal is to promote and enhance the local economy, to provide ecological benefits, to promote local businesses, or to bring jobs to a community, there’s a great deal of interest in the buy local concept and in making it work for both urban and rural communities across the country.

I spent a significant amount of time going to conferences and talking with various groups and individuals, and in the process it became evident that while buying local is a laudable concept, putting that concept into practice was the problem. I encountered people everywhere who believed passionately in the local movement, but no one was answering the critical question: How do we make it easy to buy local?

In an age of intense internet commerce, there has to be an intersection created between local establishments and online retail opportunities; every business needs a significant online presence in order to thrive. Making it easy to buy locally means making it easy to access local goods and services, not just in person but also via the internet.

Almost everyone shops online, and when local businesses’ products and services aren’t readily available online, those businesses lose to national retailers—retailers whose products are generally just one convenient click away. The buy-local concept is there; it’s the tools to do it online that are lacking.

Local Marketplaces Online

Amazon can be understood as a dual community: a community of sellers combined with a community of purchasers. The solution to integrating the buy-local concept with the ease and reach of an online retail marketplace, therefore, is to create a community to sustain it.

The goal of such a community would be a thriving online marketplace addressing the buying and selling needs of