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.

When you start talking to experts in organic SEO, one of the first things they tell you is that if you quit the SEO game before you attain first page placement for at least a few of your choicest keywords, you probably shouldn’t bother doing SEO in the first place.

The reason why they would say that is pretty well established: less than 2% of all searchers get to Page 2, so if you’re on that first page, you’re basically getting nothing compared to what you could get if you were in the first few spots. Does that really mean that SEO is a complete waste if you don’t hit Page One, though?

To get into the nitty-gritty and answer that question correctly, we have to look at what SEO does for a website.

• Builds ranking — obviously, the primary function of SEO is to shoot your website up in the rankings for your targeted keywords. If you don’t get a high enough rank to see meaningful search traffic, you’ve failed this part of the equation.
• Widens your sales funnel — every page that links to your website becomes part of your sales funnel; the complete set of link-chains that will eventually take someone to your site. Even if you don’t get a first page placement, building backlinks will widen your sales funnel.
• Builds authority — authority is a tricky notion, because it comes from so many sources. Your page becomes more authoritative based on how much relevant content it has and how old it is; your site becomes more authoritative based on how many backlinks from unique root domains point at it and how many relevant pages it contains. Even if you don’t get first page placement, organic SEO will still help build authority — which is important because if you come back in the future to ‘finish the job’, you’ll already be partway there.

So, is first page placement the ONLY reason you would ever purchase SEO? No. SEO helps your website in other ways as well. But generally, SEO is priced on the assumption that you’ll shoot for first page placement, so it might not be a very good buy if you’re not going to go for the gold…and really, why wouldn’t you?

Sometimes we online gurus can get a little too caught up in our own online world, and we forget that people have options — sometimes strong ones — that don’t (gasp!) involve a computer. After the entry we posted a couple of weeks ago about organic SEO vs. PPC, someone emailed us to ask how SEO compared not to PPC, but to an offline option: direct mail. Now, we’re not experts in direct mail. But we did a little bit of research and we made a few assumptions and I think we have a good baseline to compare from.

SEO
If you’re a small business, SEO can seem like it’s got a steep entry fee. After all, you can’t do SEO without a website, and websites can be expensive — a few hundred dollars is a big bite of a small business’ advertising budget, after all. Then you have to pay for a few months of SEO before the results really start to show. Then once you’ve ranked for a few choice keywords, you have to keep up the work to make sure a competitor doesn’t knock you off the block.

Direct Mail
On the other hand, if you’re going to get into direct mail, you need quite a chunk of change as well. Not only do you need to hire a firm to design a killer ad for you — which can run a thousand dollars or more — but you need to rent the lists of addresses as well. Each list of 1000~2000 addresses costs about as much to rent as a month of SEO costs to have done, and you can expect about a 1% ‘conversion’ rate if you do everything well — so you’re spending a few hundred bucks to get between 10 and 20 customers into your store.

Results
If you can make back that few hundred bucks off of those 10 or 20 people, you can have some good results off of direct mail. SEO, on the other hand, converts a bit better — generally 2-4%, and actually a little bit higher if you focus on local internet marketing specifically. You won’t get several thousand ‘hits’ all at once like you will with direct mail, but you will catch up with the total number of hits over a month or two if you play your cards right. In short, unless you really NEED those 10 or 20 customers through your doors in the next couple of weeks or you’re going to go under, SEO pretty clearly beats out direct mail as a form of advertising.

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.

No one is arguing the fact that you need traffic in order to be successful online. End of story. But where you get your traffic from; now that’s a debate that will rage for ages. Proponents of organic SEO claim that the cost per visit in the end is much less than from a more direct form of traffic purchase, primarily pay per click marketing. PPC management firms, on the other hand, claim that SEO is hampered by high entrance costs made worse by a lack of return.

The truth is, they’re both right.

Cashflow or Cash Efficiency?
The two competing economic drives for any entity — but they are particularly pressing for small businesses — are cash flow and cash efficiency. Think about it like a grocery store: you can buy a small package today for a small amount, but the cost-per-pound will be high; or you can by a big package today for a bigger amount, but the cost-per-pound is lower, so you actually save money in the long run.

In this scenario, pay-per-click advertising is like buying those small, high cost-per-pound steaks. You purchase 1.5 lbs. of meat for $4.98, and you’re happy to do it because you only have $10 in your pocket, so you can’t afford to pay less than $2.99 per pound. SEO is like buying a Family Pack — you buy 12 lbs. of meat for $15.78, and you’re happy to do it because you’re only paying $1.49 per pound.

Traffic Now or Traffic Later?
This works because, in PPC, you only pay when someone clicks through. That means, if your conversions are decent, you should make a sale for every 50 or so times you have to pay for a click — in short, you make your money as you spend it, so you have better cashflow even if your cash efficiency sucks.

With organic SEO, however, you’re essentially investing — you pay $400 this month for 3000 visitors that trickle in over the next three months. Your cost per visitor is quite low, but the cost is all up front and the income is all a long ways off. If you don’t have the financial backing to stay in business for those few months, SEO simply won’t work for you.

In short, the answer is that SEO isn’t actually better than buying traffic — not for everyone. Different business in different circumstances will find one preferably over the other, but neither is clearly superior overall.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of Bum Marketing, it works something like this: you have no website, no money, and no nothing except a computer, an Internet connection, and a basic understanding of the English language. You go out and find a product that has an affiliate program and an article directory that will allow you to post affiliate links. You write articles about the product, include your affiliate links, and post them.

At some point, someone reads your article, follows your affiliate link, and buys the product. You make money. It’s article writing and distribution at it’s most primal and unpolished.

The thing about Bum Marketing is that it actually works for some people. To figure out how this relates to SEO, we have to look at which people it works for — and more specifically what they do to make it work.

What they do is simple: they write a strong article. Then, they spin it on both the sentence and the word levels. Then they take the spun articles and they distribute them across hundreds of article directories. They link all of the spins to one ‘main’ article, and then they attach their affiliate link to the ‘main’ article.

This works, and it works well — because not only are they weaving a wide sales funnel to guide visitors down, but the linking structure makes that ‘main’ article look very nice to the search engines, so it’ll get maximum natural traffic and exposure.

We SEO nerds would do well to look at this humble, grassroots practice when we build our backlinks. If we take the time to identify the best pieces of off-page content and build link structures around them, we could end up benefiting our clients even more in the long run than if we had simply built those structures around the parent site.

It might run contrary to some people’s ideas of SEO, because those secondary links obviously don’t help the main page achieve first page placement. On the other hand, if the off-page content is good enough to drive traffic and get conversions, will the client really be that upset that there was an extra step between Google and his pocketbook?