Canada Do Not Call List & Why Your Business Needs a Website

Today Canada announced their equivalent of the US ‘Do Not Call’ program.

In the US the program has not only been a huge success, but has resulted in $26million in fines. In Canada there is a  $15,000 violation fee for unsolicited calls; effective September 30^th 2008.

The Canadian government passed legislation in 2005 mandating the creation of a do-not-call registry.  The registry is scheduled to take effect in September 30^th 2008. The Do Not Call program will be administered by Bell Canada (Canada’s largest telephone and telecommunications company) and is designed to allow phone owners to avoid solicited calls by Telemarketers.

The legislation still allows some business types to make unsolicited calls; e.g. registered charities, business with prior relationships, political parties, survey companies, and newspapers. Canadians can register with iOptOut.com to choose which they want to exclude – some or all.

What Can a Small Business Do?

GET A WEB SITE THAT IS USABLE AND SEARCH FRIENDLY

Search friendly simply refers to the fact that the site needs to be easily accessibly oin a page by page level to the search engine programs who crawl or surf the web discovering new pages, determining their ‘relevance’ to a term, and then including them in their results or SERPS (search engines results pages).

How?

1. understand what SEO is
2. determine your geo-market and plan around it
3. conduct keyword research to see what your online target market is searching for using keyword research tools
4. create a simple site plan (information architecture) to maximize the use of these keywords for both human users and spiders
5. create full onpage elements for coders to use in the site design including
   1. titles
   2. Metadescriptions
   3. Headers
   4. ALT attributes
   5. Relevant copy
6. get a copywriter who can write the right copy (it’s not as easy as you may think)
7. get a designer who fits your needs
8. get a developer who can create in a search engine friendly manner
9. test…..test….test
10. Get other topically relevant sites to link to you

Sounds like Gobble-de-Gook?

Here’s a few easy steps with easy resources, all on this site to get you going.

For NEW Sites:

1. Read about What SEO Is here.
2. Read about Keyword Research here, and follow with an advanced read on Search Language vs. Search Intent
3. Read about writing titles, meta descriptions and other onpage elements here
4. Figure out how to start developing your optimized site here
5. Develop your site and follow with a link campaign

 For EXISTING Sites:

Everything is the same apart from the development phase, whch hinges on the previous phases… so at the risk of repeating:

1. Read about What SEO Is here.
2. Read about Keyword Research here, and follow with an advanced read on Search Language vs. Search Intent
3. Read about writing titles, meta descriptions and other onpage elements here
4. Figure out how to optimize your site here
5. Develop your site and follow with a link campaign

If you are not on the internet band wagon yet, we suggest you check out some Canada business internet stats here (scroll down one page past the conference announcement).

Data includes:

1. 88% of Canadian households have high-speed internet access. This is currently the ninth highest level of broadband penetration by country in the world. People with broadband connectivity are usually internet savvy; they are more likely to bank online, research online, search online, and purchase online
2. Ebay, Amazon, and Yellow Pages all received visits from 33% of the online population or more. 33% of online Canadians visited electronics goods websites, 27% downloaded e-cards, 20% visited a gift/flower web sites. Canadians are looking to buy and are buying online.
3. PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that online ad-spend* will grow faster in Canada than anywhere else in the world over the next 5 years for two primary reasons… read more
4. http://seminsights.com/opinions/sem-in-canada

SEMInsights is happy to take your questions and emails. Please don’t call J

Now is the time Canada…. Step Up! We’re wanting and waiting to help you.

laura@semcanada.org