Many people think of SEO as a business staple – in the same way that email, desks, and office products are business staples. However, this isn’t something every business needs, especially if you’re a small business with a modest marketing budget. This is true for you in the following cases.
You Have low Keyword Volume
You don’t need to be listed on Google’s first page if your most relevant keywords are only searched for occasionally. This investment is nothing more than a waste of money because you won’t generate enough click-throughs to get a good ROI. Instead, all you’ll get is a very expensive ego boost.
You Serve a Small Local Market
When your business serves a small or midsize market (e.g. a dental practice, restaurant) SEO won’t work because the keywords you’re targeting will lack sufficient volume to generate ROI. You should focus on local SEO here instead. This requires the use of different techniques than are used in a standard campaign.
Your Competition is too Strong
If your maximum budget is much less than your competitors’ budget, the likelihood that you’ll get high rankings for strategically important keywords is nonexistent. This has proven true in certain industries (e.g. insurance, banking) that are dominated by a few big players who have very deep pockets. Unless you have the ability to conduct very sophisticated keyword and competitive research you’ll only be able to compete with them on keywords that fly under their radar.
Your Budget is too Small
SEO requires a big budget because there’s a lot involved with it – producing and marketing content, scouring the territory for link-building opportunities, and developing new tactics, just to name a few of the tasks you’ll need to devote time to. Mechanical, assembly-line, formulaic execution won’t work here. As a rule of thumb your budget should be at least $1,000 per month if you want to see results.
Your Website is a Disaster
For you to have any chance of success with the search engines, Google crawlers need to be able to find and accurately evaluate your website content’s relevance and authority. If your website stops Google from being able to do this, Google won’t be able to figure out how to match your content with searches related to your target keywords. This means that if you have a website that’s old, poorly constructed, or has issues (e.g. poorly constructed URLs, missing or badly written title tags, mobile-unfriendly design, no pages to support primary target keywords, a faulty internal linking structure) you’ll need to do an overhaul before investing in the search engines will make sense.
You Have a Radically new Product or Service
You have many exciting marketing options to choose from, but since people are unfamiliar with what you’re offering they won’t be looking for you in the search engines so SEO isn’t one of them. You’ll need to spend some time familiarizing your market with what you’re offering first.
Deciding Whether SEO is Right for Your Brand
If you’re still unsure whether search engine marketing is a good investment for your business, you should start by conducting some research. This will help you properly evaluate the opportunity and its cost. It’s also important for you to do this because you can’t afford to just “dabble” in this form of marketing. If you’re going to do it, you need to do it right. Of course, if you don’t’ have enough time to invest, this is bound to happen unless you reach out and hire us at Affordable SEO Company. Our professionally managed firm will put together a great campaign for you that will produce the results you desire.