Small businesses must be competitive online and embrace the new media challenges that many traditional businesses face. The good thing is that it’s not too late, small businesses are still traditionalists and acting swiftly will go a very long way in dominating the local market space.

Here are some tips for leaping ahead of your competition:

1) Google Places

a) Make sure you have created or claimed your Google local business listing online by going here: http://www.google.com/local/add (if you don’t have a Gmail account, create one and you’re set by going to http://mail.google.com – it’s free)

b) Visit us for some Google Places optimization tips on internet marketing for small business and if nothing else is done other than creating your business listing for free, make sure to use a syndication service like Universal Business Listing to skyrocket your rankings to the top of Google Maps.

2) Website Keyword Optimization

a) Make sure if you have a website, to do basic keyword optimization on the content of the website, also known as On Page Search Engine Optimization.

b) A good resource is an article I wrote on Meta tags, this will be a great start to getting the edge over your competition, ready my guide on How to Use Meta Tags.

3) Blogs

a) If you don’t have a website, then creating a WordPress blog should be very easy (http://wordpress.org) , or we can help you set it up in a flash. You could also register a free blog (http://blogger.com) to start sharing your knowledge and content, remember to link back to your main website.

5) Video

a) Create a simple video about your business and submit this to http://youtube.com. This could be a webcam video of you introducing yourself to your market, sharing some slides of text or before and after pictures of your work. This will help you with credibility and trust and increase repeat traffic to your website.

6) One Last Golden Tip

a) Internet marketing for small business is easy when you do the above.

b) Again, make sure to use the keyphrase you want to strengthen in your content title and in your text body.

This is only a start and should already give you 10x the exposure you are currently experiencing online, and if you don’t get any traffic to your website, then this will ensure that you will definitely start building a loyal customer base that will find you online.

Remember, the internet is not going away, and internet marketing for small business will become more complicated and more competitive in the months to come, you have a chance to dominate your market starting now.

Profitworx is an online mentoring program to help you market yourself online, join our newsletter for more tips and advice. We will be sharing knowledge and how to videos online and hope to see you visit us regularly. Ensure you dominate your market locally for years to come.

Here are several methods that will help you get started in building a strong SEO plan for your website to get you a greater ROI:

Organic Optimization

Pay-for-placement strategies like PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising alone cannot guarantee optimum results for your advertising campaign. For one, the cost of this kind of method is becoming increasingly expensive. Also, PPC you can become a victim of PPC click fraud. PPC does not have residual benefits and once you turn off the ads from Google or Overture, the traffic stops coming. The answer to this problem would be to diversify. Organic SEO and PPC can be combined to successfully garner more visits from online users. Websites that are visible both organically and in paid placements have five times more chances of receiving clicks from online users. Diversifying your tactics buffers the expense benefit derived from the paid placement as well as increases clicks to up to 500%. The ads+search combination is a strategy that will definitely work for you.

Naturally listed sites, thanks to true SEO organic solutions and good content, offer higher possibilities of amassing greater ROI. The following facts support true SEO as the best method among organic solutions:

• Studies on user attitudes show that the greater number of Internet users like natural search results the most since the resulting listings were more relevant to their searches.
• Six out of every seven Internet user clicks are due to organic listings versus PPC listings.
• Good SEO gives you regularly updated, unique and relevant content as well as generates targeted traffic, which means that the people who will most likely click through to your site do so because your site’s content is relevant to their search query. The more relevant your content, the more chances you have of attracting search engine spiders that will get you higher page rankings.
• 60% of all top-ranking search engine listings are made up of organic listings.
• An SEO optimized and maintained website receives continuous traffic from key search engines for free. ROI is increased thanks to that traffic which has great potential of turning into clients.

Adding Relevant Links

Links are only valuable to your website when they are relevant. No matter how many reciprocal links your website may possess, major search engines still will not take any notice of your site unless those links have a substantial degree of relevancy to your website’s theme or content. This is simply because major engines have an aversion to links that are totally unrelated to a particular website’s topic. Relevant back and outbound links have the most weight when it comes to search engines. The more valuable links you have, the better the odds are for you of ranking higher on search indexes, thus giving you substantial ROI.

Measuring Web Traffic

Monitoring one’s web traffic is an essential part of measuring your marketing campaign’s degree of performance. It would be foolish to gamble away your money by having nothing to measure the effectiveness of your marketing methods by. A prudent marketer will always be watchful of his website’s traffic, since it would help him determine whether or not his chosen marketing tactics are worth the money he is investing in them.

If you know

• how consumers locate your website,
• where consumers come from,
• what specific keywords/phrases were used to arrive at your website,
• which search engines were used to get to your website,

then you will be armed with the right information to help you streamline your marketing campaign for maximum performance. You will be able to have power over your online company and your ROI.

Outsourcing Your SEO

Companies will perpetually seek ways to cut down costs at all working levels and that includes the arena of SEO Services and marketing for their online site. It takes a big budget to invest in maintaining in-house functions not to mention paying for the specialized skills and resources that have to go with them. Besides, corporations have other important things to spend on such as maintaining customer service levels and market shares. If a company wants to do its own SEO for its business website, then it is looking for a whole lot of responsibilities and expenses to attend to. To save time, effort, and money, outsourcing your company’s SEO is your best alternative. The short-term and long-term benefits (which include amping up your ROI) that you stand to gain from outsourcing SEO are just too cost-effective and convenient to pass up.

There are two methods that will enable you to dominate the first page of major search engines, SEO and SEM. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will enable you to grow organically (naturally) and through consistent and methodical application of SEO Services you will be listed on the first page (industry dependent). The benefit of Organic Search Engine Ranking is the fact that you will be listed for Free, and potentially receiving thousands if not millions of visitors to your website at no cost to you. This is always the longer term strategy for major success. Search Engine Optimization is long term growth and goal setting and eventually giving you a massive return.

Search Engine Marketing will enable you to dominate the search engines immediately, but at a high cost. The most effective way is PPC (Pay Per Click) e.g. through the Google Adwords program which enables you to bid on keywords you would like to be listed for. Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword you would need to match a similar bid as others in order to get the first page and position ranking for your website. See it as a billboard on a freeway, only thing is, whoever bids appropriately will get the exposure. This is a ver expensive way to market your website, but for many it is essential in order to drive visitors to their website.

Usually a combined approach is acceptable where a newly launched website drives traffic through PPC while SEO is being built up for the long term.

To illustrate by example, I have used a competitive keyword such as “Weight Loss”. There are currently around 450,000 Searches per month on Google for that key term. In order to launch a website on Weight Loss and have any hope to be ranked on the first page of Google in order to get your share of 450,000 first page queries, two things need to happen; you either pursue SEO, SEM or both. It will take you a while to get to an Organic SEO first page ranking in Google, so the earlier one starts with Search Engine Optimization for your website, the better.

What does one do while SEO Services are being implemented on your website, and you want immediate traffic and targeted visitors to your website? You use a service like Google Adwords to bid on the key term “Weight Loss” and get Advertisement listed on the first page of Google.

The average bid for the key phrase “Weight Loss” is $2.65 per click (Cost Per Click). That means that each time a searcher clicks on your advertisement in the sponsored PPC list, you pay $2.65 to Google. This is before anything else, before they buy or read anything on your site. Google has provided the doorway to your site from the Google front page for that cost. What you do with the visitor after that is entirely up to you.

Seeing that there are 450,000 search queries for “Weight Loss” every month, trying to capture that with PPC will be devastating, you would need to have a budget of 450,000 x $2.65 to potentially take each click from those search queries. That would be a whopping $1,192,500 PPC budget monthly to get the potential visitors. No a wise move. Maybe a budget of $2,650 monthly would be more acceptable, aiming for 1000 clicks and visitors to your site. Doing this on an ongoing basis would be a fixed cost, but also limited growth and potential.

Now to SEO, do you see the potential? If you were ranked on the first page of Google for “Weight Loss” and let’s say, you shared the traffic with other sites at a conservative 10% that would mean you could potentially get 45,000 visitors to your site for Free. But first, you need to speak with an SEO Consultant to pave the way for Organic Search Engine Optimization success. To closely match the PPC budget, you may want to spend $2,500 per month on your SEO goals and strategy.

The following graphs will explain the return on your investment in SEO versus SEM.

The above scenario illustrates a direct cost per click for SEO versus SEM costs and the long term benefit of SEO. SEO is not PPC and not direct marketing in any way. What it is is an investment in your website organic growth and potential dominance in your market. PPC can never dominate a market niche, SEO can. We have the cost per click on the left and the number of months 1-12 at the bottom. Let’s look at this chart in finer details.

By spending $2,650 on PPC you have a monthly cost that is fixed and continual. By spending $2,500 on SEO it may be more expensive to drive traffic at the start due to results coming in slowly but compounding as the effort continues. Any SEO Consultant will never quantify SEO with cost per click, but hey, we need to illustrate the SEO advantage over PPC. We can see a cost similarity at months 5-6 where the cost per click would potentially match that of PPC.

As we can see from the graph above, the CPC (Cost Per Click) compared between SEO and PPC start shifting dramatically between month 5-6 to become increasingly cost effective. At his point if you were doing both on your website, you could effectively abandon PPC for the specific keywords or include other keywords you are not ranking for yet. By month 8 you cost per click has dived below $0.50 and by month 12 your cost per click is around $0.03. This comparison is only for the first 12 months; imagine the ongoing savings on unnecessary PPC costs up to year 3 and more?

Okay, so now to reveal the absolute shocker. Although our CPC as decreased, our PPC target was for only 1000 visitors per month. What would SEO deliver on visitors with a potential keyword such as “Weight Loss”, receiving 450,000 searches on Google alone? Okay, here we go.

Again, our breakeven point is around month 5-6 with equal amounts of traffic being generated from both PPC and SEO, but after this it is a complete runaway. By month 7 we are more than doubling our traffic at 2,880 visitors and by month 12 we have achieved traffic rate of 92,160 visitors monthly to our Weight Loss website.

The power of SEO is huge, and luckily for you, most website owners and competitors don’t realize this yet. It is the holy grail of successful online businesses. You have the key in utilizing Search Engine Optimization Services to benefit your website and business growth online.

So in effect the question can be: “If I had $2,500/month to spend on my website for the next 6 months, should I go SEO or SEM?”. I think the answer is clear. Are you a patient person? Impatience has led to the downfall of many potential moneymakers and banned to the internet graveyard.

The claims made in this presentation are hypothetical and based on real case examples and solid SEO theory and practice. Although these results can be achieved in your niche market, this example serves to illustrate the power of SEO.