SEO and Internet Marketing: The Poor Man’s Marketing

For smaller businesses with smaller budgets, Internet marketing - namely search engine optimization (SEO) - levels the “marketing playing field”.

No matter how small or large, every business must market itself in one way or another. And marketing isn’t cheap. According to a report by the Direct Marketing Association, approximately $346.4 billion was spent on marketing in 2007 alone. If you’re a small business, you mostly likely don’t have the sort of cash required to compete with many of your larger competitors... but that’s assuming you need a lot of cash to compete. Now here’s a twist for you: it may not actually take as much money as you might expect to beat the big guys.

There is a marketing phenomenon sweeping the nation and in my opinion it is just what every smaller business should be doing... right now, today!

Even as a small business you could begin competing today with much larger competitors; the same companies you could never compete against a few short years ago. Without launching costly, full-scale marketing campaigns, how is this possible? In my opinion, (besides word of mouth) Internet marketing - namely search engine optimization - is the #1 form of marketing smaller businesses should be engaging in. Even if you are not in a large metro area, you still need a strong online presence. There are an increasing number of businesses in lower populated states like Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming looking to gain more online visibility. As such, it is no surprise that the demand for good Montana Internet marketing and SEO services, for instance, is on the rise.

So why is the online marketing channel such a superb fit for smaller businesses? First, according to a study by MarketingSherpa (Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007), search engines are the leading source of information for U.S. buying decisions. Did you catch that?!?! THE leading source (regardless of your business size). With in excess of 4 billion searches conducted online every day, the question is not IF interested prospects are looking for you in search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Rather, the important question to ask yourself is “WHO are prospects finding WHEN they search for what you sell?” And “Are these salivating prospects finding your business through search engines?” If not, then you could be losing business to your competition.

Search engine optimization often yields the highest return on investment (ROI) compared to other forms of marketing (source: MarketingSherpa’s Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007). Low cost, high yield marketing - if you’re a smaller business, then this is probably just what you’ve been looking for. I've heard larger business express their frustration when they see smaller competitors ranking higher than them in search engines. I just tell them, "It’s just the nature of search engines, where money doesn't equal high rankings and relevancy matters most."