By Catherine Parker on 2004/06/23
There's a sentiment among website owners that search engine marketing is only viable for large businesses. It's as if search engine marketing is seen an exclusive practice reserved for those with an already huge market presence, and is not as effective for a small site owner.
If you thought that only major players can derive value from a full service search marketing effort, you were wrong. Well ok, in the case of a small fleamarket stall, your business might be just a bit too small. But if you have a website and you're serious about generating visitors to your site that will eventually become customers, you're not too small to benefit from search engine marketing. If it's done properly, it will be money well spent.
The Great Leveller
The fact is that the Internet is a great leveller. Suddenly, on the breadth of a search engine result page, a boutique hotel that started up three months ago can compete realistically with a well-established, multinational hotel on the same page. Yes, brand familiarity does count, but high up on a search engine results page, as opposed to in the offline world, you're suddenly given a level playing field on which to build your brand - even if you're small and have limited resources.
It Pays for Itself
If you outsource your search engine optimisation to a specialised company, it probably won't be cheap. In essence, you're paying for the huge amount of time it takes to build up and optimise great content for your site, and source relevant inbound back links that will increase your rankings.
But one of the biggest open secrets about the search engine marketing game is that if you target your campaign for the right keywords likely to be used by your target market, and ensure your site is able to deliver the promises it fortells in its copy, the money you spend on a search engine marketing campaign will pay for itself many times. This is because higher rankings for the right queries will result in more targeted leads to your site.
Even if you think you don't have the budget for a full haul search engine optimisation of your site, ask yourself this: do I really have the money to waste on the maintenance of a site that's not bringing any business my way? Yes your site may look beautiful, but if no one sees it, there may be no customers to pay for its upkeep.
Pay Per Click
Even for the budget-conscious who don't have the cash to make major changes to their site, sponsored listings, or Pay Per Click marketing is a viable search engine marketing solution. With Pay Per Click, you pay a bid amount for your listing to appear on a search engine under the "paid" or "sponsored" section. No changes to your site are necessary, but you still get exposure on search engines.
You don't necessarily have to have deep pockets for a Pay Per Click campaign, provided you're bidding on niche keyphrases for your site. Paying for sponsored listings like Google Adwords allows you to set your own daily budget: when this runs out, your ads stop running. And of course, if your have proper conversion tracking in place, there's technically no way you can lose money. As long as the amount you bid for a keyword is as much as or less than you're prepared to spend on a lead, you're safe.
The Big Guys aren't doing it yet
Yet another secret we're imparting - few major industry players have cottoned on to the value in ranking highly on search engines. Which means you, the agile and flexible "little guy", has a first mover advantage. Right now, search engine marketing is fairly priced, and there is still room to move on results pages. However, once industry behemoths start implementing extensive search marketing strategies, it will be a lot harder to rank highly. Competition will be just that much stiffer, which could push small players out of the water when their already limited resources dry up.
If you act quickly, you can get to the top of the rankings, build up your brand familiarity, and increase traffic to your site (who will become customers). Start thinking about search engine marketing today - this is your chance to secure your place online before it's seriously threatened.
