You’re frustrated. You scrimped and saved, and kept your dreams in cautious incubation until you finally had enough capital and time to launch your small business — only to watch the entire advertising game change. Where once you could get all the business you could handle with outbound marketing, now everything has moved to the internet, and you have the distinct sense that you need to know more than how to type in a web address in order to compete.
If you’re feeling victimized by this incumbent world of technological marketing, we highly recommend hiring an SEO company.
“Wait, a what? What’s an SEO company? What’s SEO, for that matter? Is that a new operating system I should get my niece to show me?”
All fair questions, but no. SEO is simply an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, an SEO company specializes in tailoring your web presence so that search engines like Google and Bing recognize them faster and put them higher up in the results whenever potential customers search something relevant to what you’re selling. SEO services are extremely powerful because most people nowadays look for new products on the internet, to the point where leads borne of SEO marketing close about seven times as often as leads gleaned from other sources. What’s more, the modern potential consumer’s attention span is short. In fact, the average person doesn’t scroll past the first page of search results about 75% of the time.
“Okay, you’ve convinced me that this new internet witchcraft is important. How does it work exactly?”
Most SEO companies use a variety of marketing techniques and choose their methods based on the kind of business you run. Some popular methods include:
-Targeted blog articles
-Using words that describe your business in high densities throughout the ad copy
-Strategic web design
-Multi-platform social media engagement
Now if you’re used to traditional marketing techniques like canvassing, shows, and telemarketing, you might be thinking that this approach is a little indirect/anemic. As it turns out, indirectness is what the modern consumer wants. They no longer want to be sold to, Death of a Salesman style. They want to be provided with quality information so that they can self-engage and make an educated choice. Creating this quality information and then using key word densities and internet savvy to get it in front of the consumer’s eyes is the way of the future.
“Speaking of sales, I’m sold. How much will this future cost me?”
SEO services, by their very nature, are customizable services. If you’re just getting started, you might want to go the a-la-carte route and hire an SEO consultant. Consultants usually charge between $100 to $300 an hour. Once you get a good sense of what the return on investment will be for you, maybe you’ll decide to keep an SEO company on retainer. The price for having SEO services on retainer varies but is usually within the range of $2,500 to $5,000 a month.
We highly recommend keeping careful track of your finances and your customer statistics. This will give you the information you need to do a cost/benefit analysis of using SEO marketing for your small business. Just remember, the game might have changed, but you can change with it!