Affordable Small Business SEO - Know What Your Money Buys

by Tomer Harel, 5/4/2006

Background

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. SEO primarily handles what is known as organic search results, also known as the results the search engines present users, excluding paid advertisement.

The main reason people seek high rankings in the organic search results is to increase targeted traffic to their websites. SEO offers a very cost effective alternative to obtain that traffic. Other means such as pay per click advertisement or banner advertising can potentially be expensive, particularly with competitive terms where the cost per click can be several dollars.

Targeting the Right Keywords

As a small business this is particularly important. Traffic for itself is not necessarily the ultimate goal. Targeted traffic is. Selecting common generic search phrases can be a poor marketing strategy for a small business because it can generate a large volume of low-quality inquiries that cost money to handle, yet result in little revenue.

A small business will probably obtain much better results when targeting highly specific keywords that indicate a prospective customer who is ready to buy their product. Moreover, the more specific a keyword is, the lower competition it has, therefore the higher chance to 'win' that keyword for a relatively low cost.

Result Driven Approach

Let's leave all the marketing pitch aside for a moment and really get down to the facts. What really makes an SEO firm affordable? Well, we can start by looking at what is NOT affordable. Paying thousands of dollars upfront certainly does not make sense for a small business, where every dollar spent has to provide a clear return on investment (ROI), especially since the marketing budget is not too high to begin with.

That leads us to next big question - how should we measure the ROI for SEO? SEO has one objective - that is to generate targeted traffic to your website, period. The good news is that traffic can easily be measured. Every web hosting company provides visual server log files that record and analyze the website's traffic across time. So SEO effectiveness can be easily measured.

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