Small business still tend to have issues with understanding just how much SEO can impact their presence, their existence and their financial wellbeing.  The economy is forcing many small businesses to take a heavy hit and they’re struggling to survive.  The web is a solution for many, but they have a hard time understanding how SEO can help them.

It’s understandable to a certain degree.  Many see the Web in a way that many of us look at it.  It’s “world wide”, it’s global.  They tend to wonder how marketing to the world will do them any good when they operate on a local or regional level.

For many small business owners, shipping outside of the operating district just isn’t financially feasible.  This thought process makes it impossible for most to see the ROI of search engine optimization.

Another road block that they hit is that they throw up a website with some basic content, often enough to talk themselves up as well as their business, and they get little to no response from it.  After making an investment in a website that brought very little back, they’re a bit jaded about future investments that might have the same outcome.

What these small business owners lack is initiative and a strategy, but unfortunately it’s hard to develop that strategy when you’re not sure where to start – especially when the entire process of SEO sounds intricate, detailed and overly complicated.  The fact is, there’s a lot of very simple procedures you can do as a small business owner that are part of a larger strategy – all of which will improve your presence in the search engines, thus making you more visible.

Visibility Is The Key To Online Success

That visibility is necessary in order for your website to perform, but just being visible isn’t enough.  You need to be visible to the right people, at the right time, whom are looking for a specific solution – sounds complicated but it really isn’t.  It’s just a matter of using and targeting the right key phrases that go after people who are ready to buy your product or service.

If you’re trying to rank your site, and thus make yourself visible, for a few targeted terms in the market then you’ll end up ranking well in the long run.  The problem with most key phrases is that they’re too broad – especially for local/small business owners.  Imagine you’re a tire store trying to rank for “firestone tires”.  Anyone in the world looking for firestone tires would be hitting that key phrase, and most of them aren’t looking to buy anything at the moment – and certainly not from you if they’re hundreds of miles away.  You’re also competing with the millions of other sites that are coming up with a relevant rank regarding firestone tires

Get more specific though, and localize your efforts, and you see better results.  “firestone tires Hoboken, NJ” would eliminate that global competition, and being optimized for that key phrase means that local people looking for  those tires in that area will more than likely find you.  Go even  more specific with phrases like “buy firestone tires Hoboken, NJ” and you’re increasing the chance of finding those people who are ready to step into your brick and mortar storefront to close a sale.

Become A Relevant Thought Leader

When you put the effort into local SEO then obviously the search engines will view you as a relevant resource on that topic.  The result is a better organic listing with local searches with the potential of landing a top spot in the map listings (The Google 7 pack – or 3 or 1 pack depending on the number of competition in the area)

As a small business, your SEO strategy doesn’t need to be massively complicated.  You don’t need a global marketing strategy with an entire PR team to make sure that you handle your presence properly. You just need to optimize your content to make sure that Google sees you as relevant and you need to provide regular content through your site so that people have a reason to go there.  Blogs, articles, special offers, audio/video, etc;  All of these pieces of content can draw customers back to your site and keep them interested in your business.

That additional content also keeps the interest of the search engines.  If you’re providing relevant content on a regular basis then you can guarantee the search engines such as Google will put more weight on your site than on the competitors in your local market that aren’t doing anything – save for hosting that same static page they’ve had for years.

As the web continues to grow, and integrates itself into the daily lives of people (your customers) it will continue to be a relevant part of your business and a channel that should not and cannot be ignored for consumer outreach.  SEO is no longer something that can be put on the back burner, because your competitors are more than likely planning something very similar to you.  It’s a race that has a 1^st place, a 2^nd place, and so on.

Will you continue to stand at the starting line, giving your opponents a head start or are you going to put some effort into this race?