I know a lot of my fellow professionals will not agree with me but in my opinion every small business website does not need Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is a money maker if you are in the website business and making it part of any package is good business practice.
As a small business you need to evaluate your specific business goal and decide if you want to be ranked #1 for every keyword related to your site. Do you really need to be on page one of every search engine?
I live in Cutler Bay, a suburban township in Miami-Dade County. I am going to use Cutler Bay and 2 fictitious small businesses here to illustrate my point. The first one is JZ pizza and the other one is Joe’s Pest Control.
Let’s start with JZ Pizza, it is a local institution here and has been for the past 20 years. Long time residents know it and have been customers for as long as they can remember. Cutler Bay is a growing area and lots of new people are calling it home now. Competition is also on the increasing and JZ Pizza is not the only game in town. JZ Pizza needs to keep up; it needs a website especially since Bob’s Wood fired Pizza next door has a fancy website where people can build their Pizza and order online.
Sure JZ Pizza needs a good website and needs their social media presence set up. Do they really need to be on page one of every search engine when someone is looking for “the best pizza”?
Cutler Bay is about 32 miles from South Beach, a tourist in South Beach looking for Pizza is not going to drive 32 miles for a pie and neither will JZ Pizza drive down to South Beach to deliver one 12 inch pie.
Paying even a thousand dollars initially to have their website search engine optimized and then investing anywhere between $200 to $500 per month to keep the page one ranking would not be a smart thing to do. This money could be better spent on ATO (Ad Text Optimization). A successful localized Internet marketing campaign would be a better option for this small business. Remember search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals through one time optimization.
Let’s look at Joe’s Pest Control, you obviously guessed the nature of this small business and know that Joe’s folks will visit your house once a month and make sure it remains bug/termite free. Again like JZ Pizza Joe is not going to send his vehicle down to a place 30-35 miles away from home base to service a condo. The travel time in heavy traffic and the time taken to provide the service would tie up one vehicle and one employee for half a day. Joe should not care for page one. The same would be true for a CPA or other professionals.
It is not that optimization is not important, it is to some extent. You or your webmaster can do some simple things to keep your website optimized. If you have a WordPress site use the All in One SEO Pack plug-in, it is a very handy tool. All CMS systems like WordPress, Joomla, Typepad have plug-in/modules for generating Sitemaps, use them. If your platform does not have this tool or if your website is hard coded in html generate an XML site map and submit it to Google webmaster tools. Use a keyword for the alt name for your graphics. Do not have too many sub sections and sub-sub sections keep your sub pages one level below the homepage whenever possible.
Do not go crazy with backlinks and do not pay to have thousands of backlinks put in by some bot or agency. If your content is good and relevant, most of your backlinks will come from there. The golden rule is to write your content for people not for search engines. If you generate thousands of backlinks artificially you might get a lot of traffic but how many of these are your actual customers or leads?
If you have a specific business situation that you would like to share or if you disagree with what I have said please leave your comments below.
