Operating a small business in today’s economy places you up against stiff competition from big business and corporations. Any small business must have a plan and implement strategies to secure, retain and grow its’ market-share. One major drawback to this is funding and business capital. Generally the big budgets for marketing and advertising are just not there with small to medium sized businesses and startups.

One of the key points of any campaign is repetition, getting your name, brand, and/or product out there and recognizable. Repetition involves making the investment to at times do the same things over and over again to produce strong results. Long growth curves, expensive repetition of expenses to generate a growing business and extended profitability creation are not strong points for a business owner and often difficult if not impossible to commit too and stick with.

Instead, they will need to develop other ways to promote their brand/product/service without spending a huge amount of money to achieve it. The most cost effective way with the greatest impact and reach to achieve this is through search engine optimization or SEO for short.

Keep in mind that anyone can build a Website, but a Website does not generate traffic and build an audience just because it is on the web. Optimized content that appeals to a certain audience and is actively targeted to reach them is key.

There are several key factors why SEO is important for any small business on the web.

It will enable the growing businesses owner to reach out to their target market. Lets face it, yellow page advertising is expensive and ask yourself these two questions.

When was the last time you used the yellow pages instead of a search engine?

Do you even know where in your home or business the yellow pages are kept?

No matter how great your Website might be, it’s worthless if no one ever sees it! SEO, if done effectively, aids and enables you to increase the amount of visitors that frequent your Website, which may increase business and ultimately profits into your business.

SEO is also vital in that it creates opportunity to transform those visitors into customers. This is done through implementation of a spread of different systems beginning with content and ease of usability usually ending up in profit.

Additionally, SEO will help you build your reputation and creates brand recognition by enabling your site name and links to be put in front of countless potential customers via search engine results. When you take the time to properly optimize your Internet site it will increase your overall user experience and customer loyalty if the transaction is handled properly. Similarly, it helps your visitors find the information that they are looking for quickly and effectively.

Appearing in as many relevant search results on hopefully the first page enables any business to put their name and brand in front of people in places and markets never before available on the worldwide scale that the Internet has created. With E-commerce sales consistently posting positive gains and consistently taking market-share away from brick and mortar based businesses, what business shouldn’t have some sort of web presence?

More often than not, the results far outweigh the expenditure and cost effectiveness vs the cost effectiveness of traditional print marketing cannot even compare. Take the time to prioritize SEO and optimize your Website correctly. The visitors as well as the profit will soon follow.

Furthermore, with SEO you will have the power to influence and at times control your competitors. This is because a well optimized web site will bring more visitors to your Internet site which in turn grows your brand awareness and hopefully increases market-share.

In the end, SEO is certainly essential to small businesses simply because it will help them lower their across-the-board risk. This is due to the fact that our market reach is worldwide, lowering the impact of decreased demand in any one area or region. This is actually one of the more unique and often neglected advantages to SEO.

Advantage Ecommerce Solutions is your total package for E-commerce consulting and market-share domination. Whether you are just establishing your web presence, are in need of design and consulting or are ready for some new strategies to expand your market-share and dominate your competition, we work with any company any size. Schedule your free consultation today and let us show you how we can help.

.

© 2009-2010 Advantage Ecommerce Solutions Web Strategy Blog | Marketing On A Limited Budget With SEO

Pay Per Click advertising is a Search Engine Marketing Strategy that requires that you pay a fee every time someone clicks on your ad taking them to your site. The fee is the amount that you pre-bid on how much you are willing to pay per click based on a selected keyword or keyword string vs. the other bidders. Your bid affects placement of your ad in relation to the other bids. You only pay each time someone actually clicks the ad and visits your site.

Optimally, the ultimate goal with any PPC campaign is conversions. Conversions are the amount of click-throughs that are converted into your goal, normally making a sale or receiving a lead etc…. Since 80% of all searches online are done on search engines, the more exposure that you receive on search engines, both naturally and paid, the more traffic you should receive. Search engine placement naturally for any given term where you want the listing to appear can both take a lot of your efforts and take a long time to achieve. PPC cuts the time to time invested setting it up and monitoring the bids. Hence, producing traffic and conversions much faster.

The key objectives of any PPC campaign are to maximize impressions, clicks and conversions once they are on your site while minimizing cost per conversion.

Four ‘Best Practices’ to enhance to any PPC campaigns success are:

Keyword Research and Targeting – prior to launching any campaign you must research your keywords and phrases. It is also to your advantage to analyze what keywords your competition is targeting. Target the ‘long-tail’ phrases. For example, bidding on the term ‘ergonomic keyboard’ is going to be both expensive and very competitive. The person searching for an ‘ergonomic keyboard’ may or may not be just beginning their search. Bidding on the term ‘ergonomic keyboard with touch pad’ will cost less, have less competitors bidding on the same phrase and the person searching for an ‘ergonomic keyboard with touch pad’ has most likely already narrowed down their search and be closer if not at the final decision stage of their searching.

Creative Ad Copy – research PPC ad copy strategy. There are plenty of tools available like Keyword Spy, Link Diagnosis, Wordtraker and others that will help you analyze the current ads including performance stats. From this information, you should be able to formulate a reasonably successful, creative Ad.

Bid Management – If you cannot manage your bids daily, most people cannot, hire a service like ours or if necessary, use a 3rd party bid management tool. The 3rd party tool is much better than not monitoring it at all, but using a service usually more than pays for itself just in bid savings. Why pay 75 cents for even 1 click when the next highest bidder just dropped his bid to 25 cents?

Tracking, Reporting and ROI Analysis – Without feedback, you cannot improve. The amount of data that can be retrieved and analyzed from a PPC campaign can be mountainous. Look specifically a keyword performance, specific Ad copy performance, conversion rate and of course, ROI.

In conclusion, the money that you spend mounting a PPC campaign and specifically utilizing a PPC service such as the service offered by AES through our site will far out weigh the loss in sales that you are experiencing and your competitors are reaping by not having a PPC campaign and letting then reap the rewards.

Look for our next post titled ‘How To Calculate ROI On A Pay Per Click Campaign’. Please leave comments, we welcome your thoughts and ideas.

© 2009-2010 Advantage Ecommerce Solutions Web Strategy Blog | Elements of Successful Pay Per Click Advertising