Small Business SEO Isn’t Like Corporate SEO

There are a few layers of activity in the SEO world: there’s novice SEO, marketer SEO, small business SEO, and big business, or corporate SEO. Each of these is marked by a different kind of activity.

Novice SEO generally consists of some poor sod writing a Squidoo page or an EZA article every night after work, desperately hoping that his new site all about the wonders of Betta fish will hit it big. Marketer SEO is similar, but generally involves outsourcing a bunch of one-off backlinks to a poor Filipino sod who would be doing what the novice SEO guy is doing, but has figured out that he can make better money off of the back of an American marketer who has a bit more money.

Then, you hit small business SEO. Small business SEO covers a lot of ground, but in general it’s separated from marketer SEO by three elements: a bigger budget, a commitment to victory, and dependence on outside experts. A small business who decides to go to war on the Internet front will hire a group of experts — usually, but not always, in the form of an Organic SEO company — to do their work for them. They will spend the money to get the online presence built quickly, and they won’t back down simply because it didn’t happen as quickly or overpoweringly as they wanted.

That’s what most SEO companies do for a living — they focus on small businesses. That’s because the rules of corporate SEO are completely different. On a corporate level, you don’t hire an SEO company — you buy one and make it part of your staff. You don’t pay for a certain number of links or a specific result on Google — you pay a paycheck, and your experts build links by the hour, not by the link.

The lesson here is obvious: if you’re a small business, no matter how determined you are to succeed, you’re never going to be able to take on the corporations on their own turf. Don’t go after the keyword ‘Jiffy Lube’ or the keyword ‘Blockbuster’ — it’s just not going to happen. Focus on the keywords you can win — your SEO company already has a list that’s plenty long — and leave the big boys to their big boy games.