There are a lot of marketing strategies that business owners need to consider.  Many of the traditional methods of advertising like radio, newspaper, and television are still relevant and can do a great job spreading the word about your business.  When it comes to the online landscape, things have changed a lot over the past 10 years and if you are not proactively marketing your business online you are without a doubt losing money to other businesses in your industry.

That said, how do you know what forms of advertising to choose from?  There is SEO, PPC, social media, and more.  In this post, we will talk about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and discuss the things you need to consider in regards to whether or not SEO is a good fit for your business.  Let’s do this.

Should Your Company SEO Market?

Some people (depending on who you ask) would say every business should have some sort of SEO gameplan in place.  However, in the spirit of providing good value to our readers, we want to be forthright.

The first thing you need to ask yourself when considering SEO is; do you need clients now?

If so, SEO might not be the best place to start.  The thing is, SEO is a long game marketing strategy, and unless you live in a very small town with no competition you will likely need to wait before your phone starts ringing from your SEO efforts.  If you find that you are in the position which you need immediate clients, you might be better suited to start with paid traffic because you can get it right now.  Google Adwords and Facebook are both great places to go when looking for immediate reach through paid ads.  Even if this is you, SEO is something you SHOULD keep in your mind and start implementing so you can get the traffic from paid ads now and the traffic from SEO down the road 😉

Truthfully, this is probably a great strategy for any new website/business.  Paid traffic now while building your SEO empire for later.  The only problem with that is money.  While SEO is technically “FREE” traffic, it takes money to rank.  You will either need to invest time and money into your SEO education or spend money outsourcing to a professional SEO company.

What companies are a good fit for SEO now?

If your business is already established and has a solid flow of clientele it can only help to start implementing and SEO gameplan.  This is a perfect time because you do not need leads right now and you have a customer base in place so you can easily justify the cost of spending money on SEO services.

To be honest here, depending on your niche and city, you should allow 6-12 months before expecting to see real traction from your SEO marketing efforts.  In some cases, beyond 12 months would be reasonable, it all depends on the competition in the niche.  For instance, ranking a personal injury attorney in Toronto is going to be much harder than a plumber in  Kenora, simply because the number of competing websites is astronomically different and attorneys lifetime value of a client is much higher than a plumber so they are fighting hard to nail down their top rankings in the SEO space.

Closing Thoughts

SEO is a great marketing strategy.  Once ranked, you will enjoy 24/7 exposure from the millions of searches that take place on search engines every day.  Ranking through SEO can be all a business needs to flourish by providing a constant and steady flow of new leads.  The best part is, once ranked you should not have to pay the steep prices it can cost to get there and can most likely dial back the link building and SEO efforts into more of a “maintenance” type deal just so the site stays relevant in the eyes of Google.

Hopefully this post has been helpful, and you now understand better how SEO works and if it is a good fit for your business.

Category: SEO