SEO on a Small Budget

This post regarding SEO is directed towards small and medium sized businesses.

Let’s look at things from this perspective.  You have a fairly new business.  Only a year or two old.  You’re launching your website and now need to figure out how to market your site.  You have a monthly marketing budget of $10K.  (That’s a very generous budget compared to what I normally see)  You know you need quick results, as most businesses do.

How will SEO play into your overall marketing plan?  Or should it?

First, what does SEO really mean to your business?  All it means is that your website is properly optimized so the search engines can effectively index and rank your content based on how relevant it is to a user’s search.  Over the years SEO experts have spent tons of time, energy and your money trying to figure out the algorithm’s of the search engines so they can get their clients ranked as high as possible.  After a lot of time, energy, money and moderate success, what happens?  The search engines change their algorithm sending every SEO expert scrambling back to the beginning to try and figure out what changed.  It’s a horrible game that we as marketers are never going to win.  Google, Yahoo and Bing will most likely never release their algorithm details.  If they do, every SEO expert will be out of a job.  :-)

Think about it this way.

Does the Coyote ever catch the Roadrunner?  NO!  But he keeps strapping himself to an Acme rocket.  He spends a lot of time and energy trying to figure out a way to catch that Roadrunner.  But the Roadrunner out runs him and out maneuvers him.  Every time!  The Coyote never learns.  He keeps trying and trying and trying.  But he fails over and over again.  It’s the same thing with SEO.  You modify your website code, write good content, implement a linking strategy, etc…  Then what happens, Google decides that something else is more important to their algorithm.  So now all that time is gone and now you have to try and figure out what changed.

That’s why no SEO expert can offer a Guarantee.  They have no control over what Google and the other search engines are going to do next.

So what do you do?

I honestly believe you have to have an SEO foundation.  You have to have GREAT content.  But you don’t have to invest a majority of your time, energy and budget trying to appease the search engines.  There are other faster more proactive ways to reach your audience and grow your business online.

Here’s what I would recommend to a client with a $10K monthly budget;

1. Invest a few thousand dollars every month to make sure your website is sitting on a solid SEO foundation.  Good use of keywords, good coding, a good sitemap feed, etc…  Just very foundational things.

2. Invest in great copy.  The copy on your website needs to appeal to the search engines.  But it needs to appeal more to your audience.  Google is not going to buy from you, your audience is.

3. User interaction on your website is becoming more important to the search engines.  So invest in a great social media strategy geared towards getting your users to connect and communicate with you on your website or social profiles.  Your social media strategy will have an effect on your SEO strategy.

4. PR, PR, PR!  If I was a new business staring out with a $10K monthly budget, I would invest $3-$4k per month in PR.  PR builds credibility.  Every new business has to establish their credibility.  PR is a long term investment just like SEO but PR has far more reaching capabilities.  It floods search engines with positive content related to your business.  Hopefully positive content.  If you have negative content out there, we’ll have to discuss that in an entirely different post all together.  PR content will get indexed and ranked in the search engines.  So PR does have an effect on your overall SEO strategy.

5. Invest in a “natural” linking program.  $500-$1000 per month.  Buying links can be costly.  You have to keep those links for a long period of time so the costs can be considerable.  Natural linking can take quite a bit of time but typically once you have those links you’ll never lose them and you don’t have to pay for them over and over again.

6. Brand your business through display advertising.  Find out where your audience is and advertise there.  Advertising can get expensive but you have to let people know you are out there.  Otherwise they won’t search you out.  They may search out your products or services but they aren’t searching for you.  For example;  If someone searches for “Yankee Candles”, the chances of them buying from the Yankee Candle website are huge.  However, if some just searches the word “candles”, they will be presented with a number of different websites to choose from.  That’s why you want people thinking about your brand.  It really does improve the likely hood of them buying from you.

Other than that I would recommend a strategic paid search campaign, a monthly email campaign and various other tactics to compliment your overall marketing strategy.

SEO is just a really hard game to play if you don’t have a huge budget.  It takes a lot of time and energy and that costs money.  A lot of money.

I know a lot of you are probably thinking, “can’t I just outsource this overseas and save a lot of money that way.”  Sure, go for it.  Let me know how it works out for you.  :)

I never recommend outsourcing overseas.  I just don’t!  I’m sorry and I don’t want to offend anyone but that’s just how I feel.