The Key To Small Business SEO

Do you run a small business?

Do you sell only locally?

If you answered yes to both the questions above I am willing to bet that you think you don’t need to have a website and to optimize your website for the search engines.

If you live in a very small community, under 10,000 in population, you are probably right, but if you are in a larger community you might want to re-think this.

The internet is fast becoming the number one resource to find where to buy products, locally and internationally.

This means that if you don’t have a website and don’t turn up in the search engines for your community and your product you are probably loosing sales.

Every small business should have a website of some sort up and running and they should optimize it for the search engines as much as possible.

What’s that you say? You don’t know how to optimize your site for the search engines?

You can always hire a search engine professional like myself to run a full fledge search engine optimization campaign for your site but that would, most likely, prove cost prohibitive for most small businesses. Depending on what you are aiming for the cost would be between $2000 and $5000 per month.

You can do it yourself, with some training.

1. You need to know how to do keyword research to find all the profitable keywords for your site.
2. You need to know how to format your title tag, meta tags and proper use of H tags in your code.
3. You can write content that can be submitted to article distribution sites.
4. You need to know how to set up a geocentric campaign for your website to drive local business.
5. You need to know what content you should have available on your site that is unique to your site only.

Yes you can do this all by yourself but you will spend a lot of time learning how to do it the proper way.

Another solution is to hire a local SEO firm to handle this for you as a small package or quick start package instead of spending months pouring through the information trying to decide which is good and which is bad. Believe me there is a lot more bad information out there than good.

I offer a quick start package for businesses in my local area (St. Thomas, USVI) and there are others that offer it to local businesses and to other businesses that find them on the internet.
I highly recommend that you use a certified search engine optimization expert to handle this for you because the certification means they know at least enough about the topic to pass the test. This will also stop you from getting the guy that has read one of the bad products on search engine optimization and is now a, “SEO expert” from taking your money and damaging your rankings.

Remember: the quick start package I described isn’t a full search engine optimization campaign but it will do wonders in raising your ranking for local searches.

If you are interested in retaining my services you can look them over on the St. Thomas SEO Services page.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 9:30 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.