Since the introduction of the web in the late 90’s, it’s growth has been explosive with an impressive 25% of all people on the planet using it. Worldwide, Internet usage seems to have grown roughly 340% since the beginning of the millennium.
A fascinating 1.6 billion people all over the world use the Internet – in search for information and educational purpose. Since over $133 billion was spent online in America alone in 2008, it’s safe to say that many of these web surfers are looking for information in order to make a purchasing decision. In 2008 alone, more revenue was generated through online spending than larger international companies like IBM and Bank of America make!
Want your share of that $133 billion dollar pie? Then your small business needs to find ways to drive online traffic to your website on a daily basis. Think you can make that happen with traditional pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns? Think again. Many PPC advertisers find that sales dont keep up with PPC costs, so they wind up shutting down the campaigns in frustration, and often their websites right along with them.
Often times small business owners will turn to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to maximize their online exposure and brand recognition. They realize that in the long-run, it’s much more cost-effective than pay-per-click. What these business owners may not know is that SEO is far more complicated than the old ways of just tweaking a website and hoping the search engines improve the rankings. SEO in today’s day and age needs to remain focused on not only that, but also getting the best possible exposure and recognition through other Internet-based resources located “outside” the website itself.
Usually a reputable SEO firm can identify these “outside” resources, and the goal is obviously to promote exposure and brand recognition for your website using a combination of the following:
Optimization of individual website pages. By avoiding the inclination to focus SEO efforts on the site at large, traffic can be exponentially improved through finding doorways that allow individual pages to rank high within search engines.
Backlinks. Clicks that come through to your site via links embedded in other sites improve search engine rankings. A good SEO firm will work hard to secure backlink opportunities and will do so in an ethical and professional way.
Understanding the Competition: Your business will find hidden ways of driving more traffic to its site by understanding what keywords the competition is going after – often times you will find keywords with little competition that have high-relevancy and “buying” potential. You can easily rank for these keywords since your competition missed them!
Social Media Services. Leveraging the explosion in online social media services such as Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. will allow you to further expand the reach of your business and brand recognition.
Monthly Reporting. Comprehensive and timely reports are crucial to a good SEO campaign – without them you have no idea how far your site has come along!
These are just a few of the expanded tools that effective SEO companies have at their disposal to help you expand your business. Selecting an SEO firm is an important decision for your small business, because competition for sales is hard enough in good times, let alone when markets are shrinking.
Retail sales have declined in the double-digits since last year – ecommerce has only experienced a 5% decline in the first quarter of 2009.
In the economy today, such a small decline actually puts the world of ecommerce ahead of most businesses to-date. If your small business has a properly managed SEO strategy, it could possibly miss participating in the current recession altogether!
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