You start with social profiles for your businesses — it can take a single person half a day just to read and make the occasional comment across Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, the various social bookmarking sites, and whichever other social arenas you choose to participate in. Then you add the necessity to put little social buttons all over every bit of content you produce so that people can show off that they Like or +1′d this or that particular comment, blog post, or picture you posted, and it starts to get really taxing.

But SEO companies continue to push the envelope, and they’ve taken to supporting (and actively taking over) social marketing efforts on their clients’ behalves. They understand that there’s a need to be served — the “full-time social marketer” is a role that ought to be filled — and they’re the most logical people to fill it. After all, you ask your SEO company to do everything else relating to your website; SEO companies taking over social marketing is just a logical extension of the role of ‘online branding expert’ that they already play.

It might take a little bit of extra time, but the benefits in terms of long-term profitability of their clients’ websites is immeasurable. ‘Social SEO’ is on it’s way to becoming a multi-billion dollar industry — and your SEO company is the right way to profit from jumping on that bandwagon. Get your profiles together and your Like buttons polished, summon your loyal fanbase and get them excited about telling their friends how awesome you are. It’s time to show up at the most profitable gathering place since they invented the village square.

Why is so important? It’s due to market trends in the mobile device industry. More and more people are replacing their home phones with cell phones and the market is huge. With more cell phones being used every day, this naturally leads to more searches being performed using cell phones than ever before.

How does this relate to small business marketing? Well, your potential customers are looking for a place to do business right now on their cell phone. When they search for a place to go, the listings they will see first are sites with a mobile website design. If you don’t have a site that has been made specifically designed for cell phone users, your website won’t show up near the top of the list.

Small business SEO has to keep up with all of the marketing trends that are changing from day to day in this very technical age. SEO companies work hard to keep up with all of the advancements so that they can keep their customers on top. Having a mobile website is part of the overall SEO structure that is being used by most companies today.

People carry their cell phones with them wherever they go. When they do a search and want to find a place to do business, they head there immediately. Your mobile website will grab people right off the sidewalk and pull them into your store or place of business right away. These types of sites give fast results and instant business possibilities.

A part of any SEO plan nowadays needs to incorporate a mobile ready website. Anything less is simply leaving customers on the sidewalk.

Designing a mobile website that can be added to your site will help with your SEO. The purpose of marketing in your local area is to get your site listed on the first page of Google. Being in the number one position is the best thing you could hope for. This is done by creating a website that Google loves using certain procedures and content. Google will look for certain keywords that you are targeting and then know where to place your site.

Since there are so many people that are using mobile devices these days, you’ll have to get your website ranked as well as develop a mobile site that people can view from their phones. Most websites don’t appear properly on mobile devices and a separate mobile site needs to be added.

A mobile website will make a dramatic difference in your local Internet marketing. People that are looking for your product or service from a mobile device will be able to find your site easier if you have one that is mobile friendly. Google lists these sites first when people do a search from their phones. If you don’t have a mobile site ready yet, your competitors that do have one are getting that business.

These days it is important to keep up with all of the marketing trends. It cannot be avoided any longer – cell phones are here and they aren’t going to be going away soon. In fact, more and more people are using their phones to do Internet searches every day. As a business owner, you have to jump on this marketing trend quickly to get your piece of the pie.

Or is it?

As it turns out, like in almost everything in business, there are always deeper levels — further lengths that you can stretch to in order to maximize your results. In the case of local internet marketing, the Next Level is mobile website design.

When you have a mobile website, it’s on a different page than your main website — which means it’s an entirely new entity for the purposes of performing SEO. A mobile website can thus target a different set of keywords than your main website in addition to offering you the usual opportunity to take advantage of mobile searchers looking for a place to do whatever it is your business does.

Kind of. Let’s call attention to that last point again: having a mobile-friendly website means people who search for businesses in your vertical can find your store. But if your store isn’t the first store they find listed, you just lost half of your potential foot traffic. Research shows that less than half of searchers ever make it past the first entry in the results.

The answer, of course, is local internet marketing. By investing just a little bit into SEO your farm stand can snag the number one spot for farm stands in your neighborhood, and you can capitalize on mobile search traffic as profoundly as possible. In essence, local internet marketing and mobile website design are perfect partners, capable of working together with extraordinary synergy.

If you’re already getting your website redesigned for mobile searchers, talk to your SEO company about getting your new mobile website set up with a different set of keywords than your main site so it can attract a different set of visitors. If you’re already getting local search engine placement services, consider investing a little extra in mobile website design so that you can pick up the mobile customers.

I’m not talking about the stupid get-rich-quick schemes, I’m talking about the ability that everyone who can type has to do simple things that other people need done. Like they say, if you want to take advantage of a gold rush, you sell shovels. But no matter what your Internet-business-related service or product might be, if you aren’t getting eyes on your offer, you aren’t going anywhere.

Enter the world of small business SEO. Optimizing your website so that it’s picked up by the search engines and put in front of the people most likely to want to purchase your goods or services is no small feat. But even a solopreneur can pull it off.

There are basically three options: you can spend time on SEO; you can spend money on SEO; or you can skip SEO and go straight for pay-per-click marketing.

Spending time on SEO is basically the ‘shoestrings and the seat of my pants’ way of doing things. It’s extraordinarily slow to take effect, it takes a lot out of the solopreneurs that try it, and in the end you really only do it long enough to be able to make a little money and put one of the other options into effect.

Spending money on SEO is exactly what mid-sized businesses do. (Large corporations just buy SEO companies and keep them on staff.) You basically purchase the services of an SEO company and trust them to get you ranked. It’s never a question of if they can, it’s always a question of how much time it’ll take for them to get it done.