The top 5 issues are:

• The changes necessary to drive SEO, particularly technology changes, cannot be executed in house on a
• timely fashion.
• Many organizations think SEO is “free” and are therefore insensitivity to the investment necessary, (as well as the continuity of investment required) to develop and maintain SEO results
• SEO programs are complex — and most organizations under invest in their web analytics systems. This deprives them of key data necessary to optimize lead generation efforts.
• Getting FTEs (Full Time Equivalent employees) to do SEO work is difficult in this age of the hiring freeze. Talented SEO professionals are available however; justifying bringing them in house is difficult.

These five reasons strongly point to the need to outsource SEO to a team of experts who can effectively deliver the service a small business needs and wants.

Source: http://covario.com

There are endless numbers of small business opportunities advertised online. Many of them are get rich quick schemes that just make money for the seller of this type of product. While there are indeed a lot of fantastic claims about making money online, not all claims are just hype. It really is possible to have an online business that works for you 24/7. So how do you separate fact from fiction? Where do you begin if you want to have a legitimate online business? What do you do if you want to get your startup business found online? Read on to find out.

If you want to start a legitimate online business, you must start by separating the facts from the hype. Commonsense will tell you that if it seems too good to be true, then it is. Why then do so many people “fall” for these claims? It is because these claims tug on our emotions, dreams, hopes and desires. They take advantage of the mystery of the internet; the fact that many people are just a bit in the dark as to how things “work” with an online business. On top of this, there is a pile of testimonials that support the claims of making a ton of money overnight. This additional element is what pushes people to suspend commonsense. People figure, “What do I have to lose? It is not that much money….and what if it really works?” The trouble is that this sort of thinking can lead to a string of purchases that really do not amount to much online progress but instead really start to add up dollar wise. People who go to weekend guru seminars really need to guard their wallets, because the hype is on maximum drive at these events. No doubt that the seminar attendee will pick up some valuable information. It is a well known sales tactic that giving away free information earns buyer trust and that it will encourage people to want more. This formula really works.

It is important to note that this formula should be used by anyone who has a product or service to sell; whether the business is online or offline. It is just that the emotions and the expectations are so out of whack with so many online plans that they seem to border on being schemes. Anyone who wants to establish a legitimate online business needs to guard against unrealistic expectations and develop a plan and timeframe for getting things done. Those who do this will remove themselves from the ranks of opportunity seekers and place themselves on the path of establishing a real online presence.

So, the first important step to developing a legitimate online business is to realize that it will take time and planning to establish an enduring online presence. A systematic approach that has proven methods will help your business be found online. There needs to be a commitment to sticking to a plan and discipline to follow these methods in a consistent fashion.

The second step is to understand what your particular strengths and interests are. This can help you identify an online business model that will be right for you. You must consider the way you expect to monetize your site. Will you sell goods or services, generate leads, have a membership site/subscription program or have a content site that sells advertising space? All of these models generate money. Sometimes it is possible to overlap these models, but with a startup business in particular it is best to focus on just one.

Step three is to research your target market. You must know if there is a demand /interest for what you want to do. Are people buying in your selected market? If your target market is just information seekers consider that it may not be feasible to sell advertising (since your visitors would be already getting what they want from your content). There are plenty of free resources that can give you ideas as to what people want. You can type in a keyword at Google trends to see what the interest in your topic is. The highest rated articles in any given category on Digg will give you ideas too.

Step four is to do thorough keyword research. This means that you find out the number of searches, the amount of competition for those keywords/keyword phrases and also if these are buying terms. If any of these three topics are not taken into consideration, your online business will be swimming up a raging river from the start. You can invest in all kinds of software to do your keyword research or you can make the decision to have experts do it for you. You really cannot afford to goof up here.

Step five is to select a domain name that has your keywords in it. This really is beneficial, so do the best you can.

Step six is to be smart about your website’s development. This means that you understand that your site really has two types of visitors; human and robots. It has to be user friendly to both of them. If the search engine bots cannot navigate your site; much of what you have done will be ignored. Your site must be code friendly and search engine optimized (SEO). Very often people think that it is enough to just place a list of keywords in the meta tags. Stuffing keywords in your meta tags is as big of a mistake as is stuffing keywords on your page. Good SEO is so much more than meta tags and meta descriptions. Great SEO is a full time job. When your keyword research is done right and you work consistently on SEO, your site will build an online presence. When this happens you will be found by search engines and human visitors.

When you build your website, you also need to build it for your human visitors. It needs to have a professional look (no spelling or grammatical errors and a polished look regardless of the style you choose) but it does not have to be fancy. It needs to deliver what your visitors expect for the search terms they used to find you. Your site needs to easy for people to navigate to find what they want. This will help you convert visitors to customers.

When this is done, you will need a way to measure and track your website’s visitors. This will give you the information you need to constantly make improvements and get the results that you want. Google analytics is free and is a great place to start.

These are the basic steps for creating a legitimate online business. It involves a lot of commitment in time, energy and money. Those who do it all themselves will be investing a lot of time in learning the details of what needs to be done. They will also need to spend a lot of time in order to get the SEO portion done right. People who do not have the time or interest in learning about all of this can just hire experts who will get it all done right in a timely fashion. It’s nice to know that affordable expertise is available (and cheaper than a lot of weekend seminars).

I recommend getting a free subscription to Website Magazine. It is truly loaded with serious information (no hype).

Both SEO and email get high scores in terms of ROI and they are both low-cost marketing vehicles for small businesses (Marketing Sherpa, 2008). PPC is also competes very well with these strategies which means that it is a viable tactic as well. Banner ads that are on a cost per click basis versus a cost per thousand impressions are faring better too.

Small businesses that do not have in house marketing staff would do well to outsource these marketing strategies to those who have the expertise to do them right. These strategies are highly cost effective but they also require a lot of time and knowledge to get those returns. Many small businesses who attempt the “do it yourself” route are sorely disappointed and become convinced that these measures “do not work”. This is unfortunate since these methods are in fact the best ones for small businesses to use.

According to Marketing Sherpa, “A sign that the industry is getting smarter is that SEO is better understood and rated higher in 2008 over 2007. Like building an Egyptian pyramid, getting a great SEO program in place will take a lot of time and effort. Once built, however, SEO is not going to go anywhere anytime soon – especially if it’s continually and patiently built upon with daily blog entries, new site content and high-quality links.”

They go on to say,” Paid search marketing also is better understood than it was at this time last year. And paid search is providing health returns for the majority of marketers using it. PPC, howver, must inevitably plateau. At some point, a ceiling in search queries will be reached that can be bought efficiently. Like any other industry hungry for expansion, global-search campaigns are the next obvious step. “

Here are some things to consider:

For companies who are spending over $25,000 per month in marketing here is the way they are evaluating it in terms of good ROI:

PPC – 78%, SEO – 72%, House email marketing – 73%, Direct mail – 43%, Print advertising – 14 % , PR – 23% and online advertising (CPM) – only 19%

For those spending less than $10,0000 per month here is the way ROI stacks up:

House email marketing – 69%, SEO – 55%, Direct mail – 33%, PPC – 39%, PR – 39%, print advertising – 10% and online banner advertising (CPM) – 15%

“Marketers with smaller PPC budgets prefer quality over volume [compared to the higher budget per month marketers who prefer volume over quality of visitor] and nurturing a lead over a long period of time. For these reasons, the less-expensive options of email and SEO make a lot more sense.” (Marketing Sherpa, 2008).

SEO or search engine optimization is essentially the “gas” that you put into your business’s online “vehicle”…namely your website.

If you do not want your website to be just an online brochure that you must personally (or someone else in your business) direct traffic to, then you will want to allocate resources to SEO.

Resources can be allocated in a number of different ways:  either you spend the time and effort in learning and doing SEO (essentially a full time job), you have someone in your business devote time and energy to learning and doing SEO or you pay professionals who already know what they are doing to SEO your site.  It is just a matter of how you want to allocate your business’ time, energy and money.

If you are like most businesses, you already have too many “hats” on and you do not have the bandwidth to learn a whole other profession.  Rather than reinvent the wheel, the best choice is to hire the professionals who can get done quickly and right.  You must remember that the longer it takes to get it done, the more time you lose that could have been spent building up your web presence.

So, what is SEO?  It is essential for your website to be found.  Do not listen to anyone who says it is not essential.  If you are serious about getting your website found and serious about it being an important part of your business, you cannot mess around with it.  You need to get it done right and soon.

Fortunately, you do not have spend an arm and a leg to get it done professionally.  Update Small Business has a team of 250 professionals and our rates offer extraordinary value.  We will customize something to fit your budget.

Look for my upcoming interview with Hard to Find Seminar host Michael Senoff.  He will be interviewing me tomorrow and I should have the podcast posted on the site in the next couple of weeks.  I will be covering SEO, SEM and PPC in more detail.

Cold hard truth

It is just not enough to have a beautiful website. If your website is not being found via search engines and back links your site is just another brochure for you. So unless you are a rock star or have a well known brand name, there is nobody but you searching for you by your name or your company’s name.

If you do what is necessary, you will be found. Imagine what that would do for your business. Rank high on a Google search engine result page (SERP) and you might decide to retire early.

This is the truth. You need to market your website and build its presence up systematically. In a relatively short period of time you will see amazing differences. When you see this happen and if you are smart you will realize that this is the time to keep your marketing going further.

Important Tip: Don’t under any circumstances allow your webmaster do anything that the search engine community calls black hat. Google will ruthlessly ban your site from the search engine index if this happens.

Talk to us about optimizing your website for the search engines. If you don’t have one, let us make one that is terrific to look and provides the best function for you. Your website will be:

• User friendly to help reduce bounce rate and convert your visitors to customers
• Search engine optimized to make sure that spiders index every page and you get ranked

Take the next step and we will hold your hand every month as we implement a customized plan to get traffic to your website. Imagine how great it will feel when your customers are marching across cyberspace a directly to you. Give them a map and that is what they will do. We’ll create that map for you.
Every website needs SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing). That is just the cold hard truth. Small businesses wonder if this is something that they can fit into their budgets. Here is another truth. You just can’t afford not to do this.

Why choose us? Because we will show you that great website development, SEO, SEM are affordable and will give a great ROI.

After you take these steps, the next step will step will set you free. You will want to talk to me about how you can automate all your marketing, customer service and billing.

Update Small Business
877.265.6568
contact@updatesmallbusiness.com

See what Google has to say about website optimization and how important it is.