Small Companies Should Invest Online

Online marketing programs can sometimes seem complicated, and it can sometimes be hard to figure out the precise correlation between investment and return. For that reason, most of the money spent on online marketing over the years has been spent by large companies with big marketing budgets. However, it's now as important for a small coffee shop on Phinney Ridge to talk to a local Seattle SEO firm as it is for a major brand to operate an online marketing division.

For a long time, a company's website was its online advertising, and companies spent a bundle on building good websites. Those websites used tags to identify them, and for the independent coffee shop on Phinney Ridge those tags would include keywords like "coffee," "shop," and "Phinney Ridge." When someone wanted to find a coffee place in that neighborhood, they'd look it up, see the website, and head down for a nice hot cup of coffee.

There were a number of advertising methods to drive additional traffic to a Website, of which banner ads were the most common. The cumulative investment made by small businesses was significant, but by far the deepest pockets in online advertising were still the big companies. The vast majority of their budgets were still reserved for traditional advertising, but it was a big enough pie that the small slice they spent online represented a lot of money, especially in a culture where most of the money was invested rather than earned.

Small slices of very big marketing budgets added up to enough money to drive innovation, and over time the marketing engines in operation online have become increasingly sophisticated and effective. Search engines have changed how they cull results, searching for keyword links instead of the keywords that were traditionally added by Webmasters, and that gave birth to search engine optimization, or SEO, which is essentially manufacturing links in order to drive traffic.

Again, large companies were the first to experiment with this concept, and the marketing departments of most large companies contain a team that knows how to do this. They have deep pockets, and they are investing more and more in strategic online marketing. That means that those companies are building robust and diverse keyword links to their own website, making it more and more visible. Smaller companies that are not playing the game run the risk of being left behind.

Greed has a way of eating more than it can hold, so even companies that seem unique are in jeopardy. Keyword tags used to be extremely useful, but site owners got greedy and started to add more and more keywords, including keywords that weren't directly related to the subject of their site, just to drive traffic. The same will be true of keyword links.

That means that the small independent coffee shop on Phinney Ridge isn't only competing with other neighborhood coffee joints. It's also competing with large companies, including massive online retailers and major coffee brands. They will see their search engine rank drop steadily, not because they're doing anything wrong but because someone else is dominating all the keywords related to their business.

The first clients of an established Seattle SEO company were probably large companies. But now any small business that doesn't jump on the SEO bandwagon puts its survival in jeopardy. They have to compete for the keywords that are most valuable to them in order to remain relevant online, drive traffic to their site, and convert that traffic into customers..

I'm a search marketing expert specializing in SEO and search engine marketing. To learn more, here's a great starting point: www.audiencebloom.com.