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”.

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.

Small businesses come and go every day across the country. We’ve all heard the statistics: four out of five small businesses fail within the first five years, and so forth. There are lots of reasons why that happens, but one of the most significant is that it’s simply too hard for a small business to get a reputation for being special in today’s advertising environment.

People in America are exposed to somewhere upwards of four thousand advertising messages every day. We’re blind to them. So how is a small business supposed to alert people to the fact that they exist and that they have something special to offer?

Simple — at some point, people who want something and don’t know where to get it look it up — and in the Information Age, they usually look it up on Google. Enter Local internet marketing: a source of easy first page placement for a variety of locale-specific keywords, but more importantly an easy way to show up on the top of the list of “Xs in City Y”.

The Local Scene
Did you know that 50% of surfers never even look past the top item in one of those lists? That means that if you purchase a bit of local internet marketing, half of the people who search for “martial arts supplies Yelm” aren’t going to even glance at your competitors. They’ll see you, find you on the little map, and head for the door. That’s a lot of power.

Cost Efficiency
The best part about local internet marketing is that it costs pennies on the dollar to a radio advertisement on a local channel — much less a TV ad or a full-page newspaper ad for a week. It’s also a lot easier to come up with 3 short lines to say about nunchaku and shuriken than it is to come up with an entire radio spot or TV ad. You don’t have to pay a (voice) actor, either.

Local internet marketing is a crucial tool for any business savvy enough to have it’s own website — more often than you’d think, it’s the nudge over the breaking point that keeps a business in business.

If you’re a small business in a small town, getting a website up online and having an SEO company do some local internet marketing for you is almost a no-brainer. The benefits are significant — you can make sure that any time anyone from (or visiting) your town searches for a term related to your business and includes the town’s name, they see you first. It’s an easy way to get dozens of extra customers though your doors every week — if not every day.

But when you live in a big ol’ city like Los Angeles, SEO can seem like a much less valuable deal. After all, when there are hundreds of businesses just like yours within a hundred — or a dozen — miles of your front door, chances are one of them is already working hard to dominate the local search engine results pages.

Right?

Not really. There’s a lot about SEO that isn’t immediately obvious to a small business owner, and this is one part of it: your business’ website doesn’t just ‘rank on Google’, it ranks for specific keywords on Google. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking general, broad-spectrum SEO or locality-specific SEO; there will always be keywords out there that no one is really working hard to dominate. They can be yours.

For example, let’s say you’re a florist. You know that “LA florist” “Los Angeles florist” and all the similar keywords are sewn up tight. But get just a little creative, and you can find dozens of keywords like “LA floral bouquet” that are untouched. Design a few websites to attract a dozen of these less-competitive keywords, and you can get just as much traffic as the site that has one highly-competitive keyword dominated (and often for less cost.)

The second trick to winning the local internet marketing contest is to control just how local you’re getting. For example, let’s say you live in Hazard, California. Hazard is just outside of East Los Angeles — toward the west. You could market your business under “Florist LA”, but you could also compete for “Florist East LA”, or even “Florist Hazard” — the smaller the pond you play in, the less you have to worry about big fish.

If you own a website that’s more than a week old, you’ve probably read something about how hiring an SEO company is a great thing. Depending on a few factors, you’ve probably either decided you should and you’re trying to figure out how to pay for it, or you’ve decided you’re going to do it all by yourself and you’re trying to find the time. Here’s why, if you’re that second guy, you ought to be trying the former.

SEO Companies Have People
The legends say that back in the day, a determined loner working all hours of the day and night out of his parent’s basement could do enough SEO to get his company from zero to Twitter in a matter of a few short years. The legends are lies, or at the very least aren’t true anymore — today you need an army of talented workers, each exercising his own from of backlinking magic, if you hope to compete for any keyword that could sustain a small business.

SEO Companies Have Time
Running a business on your own is already a more-than-full-time job. If you intend to add the hours and hours of SEO you’ll need on top of your existing workload, caffeine won’t be enough.

SEO Companies Have Resources
The idea behind doing easily-repeated work like directory submissions or blog comments is that it’s easy to type the same stuff in over and over. But what that doesn’t tell you is how difficult it is to find a sufficiently long list of relevant blogs or directories — but SEO companies already have them.

SEO Companies have Experience
There are always details, and in SEO, it’s inevitably those details that can turn an afternoon’s work into a complete waste of time and money if you don’t know how to properly attend to them. SEO companies work with people who already know those details and won’t have to fuss over getting it done right the first time.

Long story short: Don’t try to do it yourself — that’s planning to fail. Hire an SEO company to get it done right the first time, and save yourself some stress, some time, and in the long run, a huge chunk of money.

Sometimes, SEO isn’t enough — you can have mountains of traffic, and if your website simply isn’t able to turn that traffic into buyers, you need to stop focusing on SEO and worry for a while about your conversion rate. There are several tricks websmasters use to improve conversions — from targeted Email marketing gimmicks to flash banners — but two of them work on a different, more fundamental level than all the rest. The best part is that the two can be used together.

Priming Words
Like it or not, science has proven that the human mind works in large part on a subconscious level. Researchers have been able to prove that introducing a set of words that all relate to a given topic, even out of context, cause the people hearing or reading those words to start subconsciously thinking about that topic. Here’s an example:

Jerry Florida was worried. It was a gray day out, and he was wondering how lonely his morning jog would be. He usually jogged alongside a few of his neighbors, but the threat of rain might make them “forgetful” of their morning ritual. Looking around his apartment, his eyes hit upon his old treadmill, now a place to hang his freshly-worn clothes before they were washed. Bingo! He’d get his morning jog despite the possible moisture, and catch Regis at the same time.

Believe it or not, right now on a subconscious level, you’re probably thinking about what it will be like to get old. Huh? Check out the priming words hidden in that little story:
old, Regis, worried, Florida, lonely, gray, bingo, forgetful
Scientists have shown us that after reading a story like that, people will walk more slowly, think less clearly, and even be slightly more fatalistic than they were before they read it.

Consider that the next time you start writing your website copy. How can you use the power of subconscious priming to get your audience thinking about the problem that YOUR product or service solves?

Web Presenters
A Web Presenter is simply a pop-up video of a person. They are generated dynamically on the surfer’s screen so that they follow the reader as they scroll. They offer your website the opportunity to have a “face” and a “voice” that are human, and thus hard to ignore. 90% of communication is non-verbal, and a Web Presenter brings most of that 90% back to the table. In short, a website with a Web Presenter will appeal on a fundamental level that a text-and-pictures website simply can’t.

Consider the opportunity that a Web Presenter gives you — not only can you add that extra layer of communication to your website, but you can have the Web Presenter deliver the priming words in a voice that the reader can’t easily skip over. That’s some top-tier converting power!

Rentacoder. Elance. Odesk. The number of places it’s possible to go hire some ardent Filipino, Indian, or Bangladeshi keyboard jockey to do “SEO work” for pennies per hour is ever-growing — but is that kind of SEO actually worthwhile? Sure, in terms of the amount of money you have to spend up front, it can seem like affordable SEO, but there’s a lot more to good SEO than a good cost-per-link.

If you spend a half-million dollars on a new Bugatti Veyron and then it breaks down and is unusable within a month, you kind of expect your money back — or at least for Bugatti to fix it for you. Hell, you’d do the same thing if you spend ten grand on a brand new Nissan Versa that broke down in the first few weeks.

Not to denigrate all freelancers — there are some superstars out there — but by and large, when you pay a few bucks an hour, you get your money’s worth. More explicitly, almost everyone who really knows the rules of SEO and has the work ethic to kick ass has already been hired by an SEO company somewhere and doesn’t have to work through Elance or Odesk to find clients.

Here’s what happens: you pay a freelancer to build some backlinks. They do. But then a few weeks later, you find that the backlinks they’ve built aren’t working. Maybe they built them to places that have simply stopped existing (blog posting to pages that weren’t maintained, forums where the admin came through and deleted an obviously marketing-oriented post, etc.) Maybe they built links that were deemed spammy by the search engines and your site is getting penalized for them. Maybe they wrote content in ‘Inglish’ and the clickthrough rate is zero. Whatever the reason, this kind of this happens constantly. It’s literally like spending your ten grand on a Reliant Robin and then being upset when the thing flips over every time you turn a corner.

If you want affordable SEO, you should start by talking to a full-fledged SEO company. You might pay a bit more up front than you would for a freelancer, but you’ll get results that stick — and you can’t have affordable SEO unless it sticks.

Alright, listen up, because I’m about to tell you the single most important secret to success in literally any field of endeavor, online or off, and it’s only three words long: focus through failure. I’ve had websites — they failed. I gave up on them because they didn’t ‘pop’ like I thought they should. I put 5-8 hours of work in every day for months only to waste all of that time because I lost focus, and I decided that I had failed.

I was, in a word, stupid.

But the next time I tried, I decided not to invest my own time. I hired an SEO company and risked my money rather than my time. I thought I was being stupid again, and sure enough, when there was no ‘pop’ a few months later, I almost backed out and gave up. But then, I talked to this guy at the SEO services department of this company I had hired, and he told me not to give up. He said “You see the new Karate Kid movie? You know, where Jackie Chan says “Your focus needs more focus? What they don’t tell you is what ‘focus’ means – it means Follow One Course Until Success. Don’t give up — because until you give up, you haven’t failed yet.”

Of course, I let him talk me into sticking with the company, and guess what? He was right. It took another few months — long after I was past my comfort level. I kept looking at my dwindling savings and going “this can’t be it.” That’s hard for a person to do. But I stuck with it, because some gurus I talked to basically agreed with the SEO guy, and I figured I didn’t want to throw away my money like I had thrown away my time.

Eventually, we hit pay dirt. It happened all at once — Google did a PR update, and suddenly a bunch of the pages I had backlinks from went up in PR, and my page benefited. I got ranked on the first page — a few cases, in the first spot — for my keywords. It was a long and worrisome phase, those dark days, but I focused through my failure, and in the end, the SEO companies came through for me.

First page placement for some high-volume keywords: that’s the bread and butter of every single business online. But it’s a lofty goal if you’re a novice webmaster; it can seem impossible to obtain for any keyword worth having.

Of course, that’s why keyword research is the most important part of any website’s functional lifespan, but that’s neither here nor there. The point here and now is that any website can achieve first page placement — it’s just a question of whether you have time, money, or both.

Time
Having time means you can afford to wait a while for your first page placement. It means that you can invest time in creating your own backlinks, and then wait for months while those backlinks slowly build your website up further and further on the SERPs until you reach the front page.

Money
If you have money (and no time), you can obtain instant first page placement using the Sponsored Links section of any given major search engine. In order words, you hire a decent PPC management team to get your website onto the first page of the search engines by bidding on keywords and putting up sponsored advertisements.

Both
If you have both, you can pursue both plans at once — get a pay pre click campaign going for instant money, and then sit back and work on your backlinks and other SEO until you start getting some significant organic traffic flowing. Once you’ve achieved that, you can choose whether or not the PPC management is bringing in enough money to warrant keeping it up, or if you want to drop it and run with just the organic traffic.

Of course, it goes without saying that there is no “neither” option. If you’re a typical startup entrepreneur that’s already investing all of your time and money into your website, you’re going to have to sacrifice something in order to get onto the first page. It might hurt a bit up front, but once you commit to doing whatever it takes to achieve that front page placement — and you succeed — you’ll find that it was well worthwhile.

You can talk to any SEO company in the world, and they’ll all offer you the same basic concept: they’ll build backlinks for you, and raise your page’s ranking in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). But that’s a very simplistic idea, because it leaves out the complex truth behind what Search Engine Optimization does — and doesn’t — do.

SEO, when done well, will absolutely get your page ranked in the SERPs, but you don’t rank “on Google”. You rank for a specific keyword or phrase on Google. If you just haphazardly build backlinks to your page, sure, you’ll end up ranking for something — but what exactly that ‘something’ is isn’t under your control. It’s dependent on a combination of your on-page SEO, your content, your anchor texts, and the content of the pages you backlink from.

On the other hand, if you find someone to do solid keyword research for you, and you understand that SEO is, in the end, keyword-centric and not site- or engine-centric, you can (re)build your pages from the ground up to focus on the keywords you’re SEOing towards. The next realization you need to have is that not all keywords are equal.

Most SEO companies will tell you about the stats of your keyword: how many daily searches, how many competing pages, etc. Some will go a step further and tell you about the competition in more detail, telling you how many backlinks and of what quality they have, giving you a chance to determine how difficult it will be to conquer that keyword. But that’s not everything either.

Keywords aren’t just entities that search engines use to determine SERPs rankings. They’re human language, and like all human language, keywords have their own inherent context. That context can have profound impacts on your business. For example, if you could go after “free aquarium construction” or “how to build a high quality aquarium”, which would you? Exactly — you’d avoid the word “free” because it’s a dead giveaway that that person isn’t spending money if they can avoid it.

Now choose between “affordable SEO services” and “backlinking campaigns”. It’s a little harder, but the word “affordable” is a sure giveaway that the person who typed that in has money and wants to spend it — if carefully — on some SEO. The other person is probably just looking for information.

It’s small but important things like this that separate a highly effective SEO job with a mediocre one. It all starts — it ALL starts — with the right keywords.