Small Business SEO Doesn’t Have to Be So Small

Small business SEO is often regarded as a relatively minor project: you get some keywords, you write some content, you create some backlinks, and the business eventually starts to see some traffic to it’s website. It’s kind of a pity, because there’s no particular reason for it. We’ve trained ourselves to look at a small business client and say “the poor broke entrepreneur barely has $35/month for our basic link-building package; he’s toast.”

Sure, a small business almost by definition doesn’t have a huge budget, but that doesn’t mean that we should be offering them low-budget options. $35/month is more than enough to purchase a blog post every week for a couple of cents per word — and for a price like that, you can find a native English blogger more than willing to put the effort in to generate sharebait once a week.

When you shoot the moon like that, one of two things happens: either you get normal everyday results, and the money you spent is just as well spent as if you had spent it on the low-key, low-budget link building and other low-level SEO practices, or you get success — you get a blog article that gets shares and gets it’s own natural backlinks and becomes a valuable part of the business’ traffic funnel.

So why are we as a industry not trying to crank up our levels of small business SEO? The answer is because that it takes thought. It’s not easy — there are a lot of good reasons why we want to keep doing the same repetitive, nominally-functional linkbuilding day and in and day out. It doesn’t tax our creativity or ask us to vary our routines. It gets home sooner so that we can all watch the Daily Show and relax over a pizza.

If you’re a small business owner, don’t settle for crap linkbuilding packages. Ask what your SEO company can give you in terms of:

• Local internet marketing
• Content marketing
• Social media
• Custom blog creation and Blog posting
• Video marketing

There are dozens of powerful options for SEO, but many companies will discard most of them if you tell them that your budget is in the double digits. Don’t let them; tell them you’re willing to negotiate, but that you want marketing that will do more than just have your website’s URL creeping up the SERPs over months.