When you have a small business client that comes to you for SEO help, of course there are a lot of ways that you can help them — but in general, the biggest choice facing any such client in the choice between local internet marketing and a more generic, broad-spectrum form of SEO.

Generalized SEO for Small Businesses
When you decide to go generalized, you’re essentially making a decision to shoot for first-place rankings on third-class keywords. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; for the right small businesses it’s absolutely the right way to go.

The reason you have to hit up the third-tier keywords is competition. When you’re competing with every website in the world, you’re not going to get them ranked for something really high-traffic like “ice cream cakes” or “used video games”. You’re probably not going to get them ranked for secondary keywords like “organic ice cream cakes” or “used Game Boy Advance”. There are huge corporations targeting keywords like that, and getting a small business to compete on that level is almost universally out of the question just for budgetary reasons.

Depending on the business, you can actually make a good profit off of third-tier, long-tail keywords like “how to make a killer organic ice cream cake” or “Game Boy Advance with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance Japanese Bundle” — that’s the bread and butter of this kind of small business SEO. If it’s a dropship business, for example, or if they are otherwise accustomed to sending their product to the far corners of the globe, you really do want to go general because those occasional orders from Kampuchea or Vladivostok are actually valuable.

Local Internet Marketing
On the other hand, for 99% of small business clients, local internet marketing is the correct decision. The reason why is simple: “organic ice cream cakes Lacey WA” is already a long-tail keyword. There’s almost no competition for it — and yet, the vast majority of the business’ customers live in and visit from Lacey, WA. When you’re top-ranked for the only people who actually matter, who cares how many pings you get from the tail end of Russia?

Affordable SEO is the holy grail of webmasters everywhere — if you can offer the struggling business owners a surefire way to rank them on Google for ‘an affordable amount’, you have business in your pocket. Of course, every business owner has a different idea of what they consider ‘affordable’. It would actually benefit most SEO companies to have a few different payment setups to take advantage of different small business’ SEO expectations. Let’s look at a couple of different examples to show what I mean:

Business 1: Clever T-shirts
This shop was set up by a college student with some wit to him. The student spends $300/month purchasing cheaply silkscreened shirts from a shop in Bangladesh that put his .png files onto the shirts for $3 including shipping. He sells those 100 shirts for $9 each on campus and in the town’s gaming shops. Of his $600/month profit, he spends half on beer and World of Warcraft, and is interested in putting the other half toward improving his business — and half of that into SEO so that he can do web sales. He’s going to be in business for at least the next 6 months (until summer break), and if he’s doing well enough, he’ll keep going over the summer and into next year.

What kind of services can your company offer someone with a consistent and long-term but relatively low amount of money to spend like this guy? How long will it take at $150/month before you can get him ranked for some quality keywords?

Business 2: The Solopreneur’s Niche Site
This website was set up by a man who lost his job, and it’s his last-ditch attempt to avoid collecting unemployment. He’s going to sell African mango supplements, and if he makes even a mild profit, he’s going to invest in further such niche sites. The gentleman in question just cashed in his last big tax return, and he has $4000 up front to spend on SEO to get his business off the ground.

Can your SEO company do something helpful for this guy to get his business kick-started given a budget that large? Or would you simply treat this as a down payment on several months of SEO?

These are extreme examples, but the point remains a good one: there are an infinite number of differing circumstances in the marketplace, and a one-size-fits-all billing plan is going to leave some significant chunk of that marketplace looking elsewhere for SEO they can consider “affordable”.

Many of you who are into organic SEO may be unimpressed by Google’s latest unveiling, entitled “Search Plus Your World”. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, SPYW affects anyone who is both

• Logged into their Google account when they search, and
• Has a Google+ account and at least one person in their Circles.

If you meet both of those qualifications, and you go up to the upper right of your search screen and click the “Show Personal Results” button, you’ll find that any relevant content created on Google+ by people in your Circles gets filtered into the results. I follow Ed Dale, for example, and when I search for “Search Plus Your World” on Google and click “Show Personal Results”, I get a few of Ed’s blog entries in and amongst my other traditional results.

So what does all this mean?

In short, it means that there’s going to be a vicious cycle in play soon. Some SEO people are going to start leveraging hardcore social marketing techniques on Google+ in order to get their content to appear on people’s “Personal Results” (hi, Ed!). That, in turn, is going to accelerate Google+’s ascent to dominance of the social marketplace — and the more dominant Google+ becomes, the more SEO pukes are going to try to abuse it.

It will almost certainly all end in Google starting to put limits on Google+ accounts much like Twitter did. But the ride we’re in for to get to that point is going to be a quick one, and some sharp, hardworking people are going to win big from this change.

Now, will all of that matter to the rest of us who aren’t going to put in the hard work to take advantage of SPYW? In the long run, probably not. It does mean that normal SEO will be mildly less effective, as there will be more ‘competition’ in the form of Google+ results that we have to unseat in order to keep our first page placements — but competition is something we’re all used to by now, so I don’t really see this being that much of a gamechanger until something unexpected comes along and upends the whole thing in an unpredictable manner — which will happen.

Everyone in the internet marketing business is on a constant quest to find the most inexpensive way to get traffic to their site so they can start making money. To that end, we constantly hear people asking which is more affordable: SEO or PPC? The answer, as you might expect, is more complicated than you really want it to be.

The problem is that ‘affordable’ means different things to different people. Let’s say, for example, that you came to the table prepared and you started your online business with $10,000 cash in the bank to get started with. You can easily spend $2000 on a high-quality website and another $1000 on content — but you’ve still got plenty left over to live on while you shell out another $1000 each month on killer SEO. You can afford to wait a little while for customers, but when your money runs out you’re going to need the best traffic-per-dollar that you can get.

You want to invest in SEO.

On the other hand, let’s say you’re doing online business on the side while you work a 9 to 5 job. You don’t have a lot of money up front, but you’ve set aside $150/week to spend developing your online business. You need your profits back right away or your expenses will outpace your ability to spend. You’re not as concerned with traffic-per-dollar, but you are definitely interested in a speedy return.

You want to invest in PPC — specifically, in a PPC management firm.

Of course, you may be in a position to do both, and there’s nothing wrong with that — SEO and PPC are perfectly good neighbors and they work well together. The PPC brings in immediate, consistent, targeted traffic while the SEO builds up to a point at which it can sustain your business, at which point you can drop the PPC in favor of your own natural, organic traffic.

But when the final analysis comes in, the question of SEO being more or less affordable than PPC depends entirely on your financial situation. Based on the market numbers (80% of the money spend on search engine marketing goes to PPC and only 20% to SEO), most companies are looking for that quick return, even if it’s more expensive up front than SEO.

Article writing and distribution is a tool that has a lot of function. It’s like the Swiss army knife of SEO — it can build backlinks, expand your sales funnel, drive your online reputation, act as a secondary landing page, prime readers into a buying mood, and it bring business overnight and for life. But the cutting-edge market analysts are starting to talk in terms of entrepreneurs becoming “market leaders” rather than simply starting a website and profiting from affiliate sales or other such techniques from yesteryear. Can our favorite all-purpose SEO tool keep up with the changing demands from the gurus?

Of course it can! Becoming a market leader, if you talk to the likes of Ed Dale of The Challenge, is essentially an exercise in developing a reputation. Ed suggests a blog, and of course that’s a great centerpiece of on online presence, but it’s never enough. Blog posting is just part of what should be a larger, organized effort to get your name into the mouths of everyone in your target market.

And of course, the other parts of that effort are going to rely on techniques that SEO has used for decades. Get a static (non-blog) website, write and distribute articles about your market, start a few Web 2.0 properties (and maintain them!), and get yourself some expert credentials by putting on free talks at local community colleges.

Market leadership is about two things: actually learning the details about your target market, and showing everyone that you’ve done the learning and you know your stuff. The first part takes a lot of hard work — but the second part is actually mostly about old-school SEO. In the end it all comes back to the oldest truth in internet marketing: if you can’t drive traffic, you aren’t going to succeed, period.

Fortunately, there are several ways that you can use other people’s SEO efforts to boost your own visibility and traffic. Article writing and distribution happens to be one of the best, which is why it will always have a place at the heart and soul of every online company’s arsenal.