Meet the adviser - Gary Evans

Gary Evans is owner and founder and of Feedalpha.com, Yourweb.ie and an Enterprise Nation adviser specialising in SEO.

After over two decades of working in high level tech positions in the corporate environment Gary chose to start his own business, to afford him a better quality of life with his family.

Now he spends his time supporting small businesses and start-ups to get seen by helping them improve their search engine optimisation and the content of their social media posts.

What challenges are small businesses currently facing when it comes to being seen online?

One of the biggest challenges we see with customers all day, every day is that they go off, and they get a website built and they think this is all brilliant, but then they don't do anything with it. It's like having a new car sitting in the garage, it's lovely, but no one's ever going to see it.

We would always lead with research. If you're going to create a new website, do your research first. Find out the type of content you need to have - and build out the frame that way. You build a website around the content.

If you do it the other way around you have a lovely looking website that no one visits, and people can get disheartened. They start putting out posts on social media but because the content they have doesn't resonate with their audience, they don't get any engagement there - the algorithms kick in and reach drops way down.

The best way to tackle that would be to lead with content first. We always say a well written piece of content, with some research behind it, is the gift that keeps on giving because a it's going to be picked up by the organic search.

If the content is good enough, you can take snippets from it, headlines, and images, and use that for all your social media assets. Because people are actually searching for those problems, if they see it on social, they're much more inclined to click back onto your blog or your website and read the rest of your information.

How can Feedalpha support small businesses?

It's a social media management platform that puts small businesses on a level playing field with large corporations.

We've fairly complex algorithms that search the internet constantly, and we produce a feed of relevant industry content every 24 hours and that works for finance, sports, health and wellness technology etc, you just put in the search, and you can build out a custom feed.

It connects to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram - if you find a really cool piece of content, you can share it out to all your platforms at the same time.

We have also built a calendar into it so you can schedule a month's worth of content.

One new feature, which is quite cool, is if you have a blog post on your website or a customer's website, copy and paste the URL into Feedalpha and it'll go off and analyse the content. It'll pull out three or four different options for posts for social media.

It also has an integration with Canva, so if you have something you want to share, but you're struggling with an image you go into Canva, pull out a free image and drop it into the post.

About Go and Grow Online

Enterprise Nation is working with Microsoft, Klarna & Vodafone to support 20,000 small businesses across Ireland to improve their digital skills. 

For more information on Go and Grow Online, click here.