Small business and SEO: a strategic approach.

A question that often sprouts up is why the small businesses are unable to reap the benefits of search engine optimization. To get some satisfying answer to this question we must understand each of these two in context of the each other. Before we delve deeper into this aspect lets us first understand the possible reasons for the businesses to make an online presence. Some possible reasons are:

• The business may just want to use its website as a freely accessible brochure for the purpose of spreading a word about it as also to serve as marketing platform through which new business contacts can be made.

• Businesses also go online to manage their critical business processes using the internet as an intranet to connect various units, or to connect to their specific clients.

• The online presence may be just to educate and make a sound impression on the existing database of customers by providing them with details of their offers on the website.

• There are quite a few businesses which don’t have any real objective in setting up a website; they are simply doing it because every one else is launching a website too.

• There are businesses which launch website to gain added business and clients through internet marketing techniques.
This last reason is the one which is directly related to our discussion here. The question which thus arises is what number of websites are oriented towards getting business from a large number of people or from international markets, and how can SEO be used by them for the purpose of marketing their website Only in the last reason mentioned above does the business require that potential customers can find their website on the internet. And most often the potential customer would make use of search engines to find new sites to meet his requirements. That is where the importance of SEO originates for the small and medium scale businesses.

The kind of exposure that a business needs will vary with its nature of business and the geographical areas in which it wishes to serve its customers.

There are plenty of small businesses out there who do not seek a global or even a national presence; rather they want their audiences from within a small geographical region. For businesses with such inclination, it may not be required at all for them to be listed in the major search engines. They may want to feature in search engines which are more commonly used by people of that geographical area. To be logical there is no point that these small businesses spend large amount of money on marketing efforts using major search engines which will be too costly and would result in lower results and lower rate of returns on the investment.

If we have a look at the global business arena, the fact that pops out is that the small and medium businesses out number the larger businesses by a huge margin. On the basis of the type of clients that these small businesses have we can classify them into two categories, the first one being B2C meaning business to customer which deal with customers directly and the second one being B2B meaning business to business and this type deals only with other businesses and not with any customers as such. Based on this classification their marketing purpose and strategy change, and also changes the SEO strategy for online marketing. Let us understand each of these separately.

Business to Business (B2B):

Most small businesses feature under this category, and they are looking for specialized groups of clients rather than large masses of internet users. They are interested in business clients and not consumers. The internet serves for them as an additional low cost marketing method to increase the number of clients in the targeted markets. For them to invest on ranking high on major search engines may not be a great idea, instead they must focus on getting a high rank in special trade directories which are used by people and businesses in that sector or industry. The rank improvement is mostly carried out by paying additional fee to these directories. The additional advantage of this is that the links from these directories to your website will increase the link popularity of your site ad thus your rank on normal search engines too rises alongside.

Business to Consumer (B2C):
This segment is composed of the retail businesses and some service offering firms like finance companies, house maintenance firms etc. The target of these businesses is the large number of general public, but often it may be limited to the population of a certain geographical area only. If the businesses wish to sell to larger markets online platforms such as e-bay and some other online shopping malls of this type may be a better choice, especially as these resources are cheaper. The service firms are mostly for very restricted geographical locations and thus listing them up with local directory services or trade associations in the field will provide better rate of return.

So with all the logical information poured out in this article, the small businesses will not want to invest in big SEO companies coming over to search optimize their websites. The online marketing strategies have to be chosen with regards to the type of business, the type of client and the location of the client. SEO may not have the answer to every business’s internet marketing requirements; rather there may be other more practical effective and more cost effective method of internet marketing. There are several SEO firms who are trying to trap small businesses for search optimizing their websites, without really understanding what exactly is required for successful internet marketing of these small or medium businesses.