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Why a Small Business Should Invest in SEO During a Recession

We all know that times are tough at the moment and most small businesses are looking at ways to cut costs. Probably the first place any small business will look to cut cost is advertising. The main reason for this is it extremely difficult to monitor the success of your advertising campaign. However with SEO things are different.

Investing in a new form of marketing at the moment may seem crazy but there are a few things to consider that may influence your decision. If you have already looked at SEO but are not sure whether it is worth it then this article may give you a bit more information.

Why Invest in SEO Now?

These are our top reasons for investing in SEO in a tough economic climate:

1. Unrivalled ROI

It has been shown that SEO has an unrivalled return on investment, even compared to email marketing. If you think about it, if your website is in the top 2 results for the right keywords you will be getting a large number of click from people that want to know about you. It is even more important when you think that around 80% of internet users will use search engines and of those only approximately 11% ever go on to page 2 of the search results.

2. Targeted Traffic

If you do your research properly you will be able to select the right keywords that people looking to buy your service will be using. If you then get your website to the top of the search engines for these highly targeted keywords you will be getting highly targeted traffic. As the people visiting your site will actually be looking the buy then a well written site will give you a high chance of converting most of your visitors.

3. Quality Tracking

There are now a large number of advanced tracking packages. A good one to try is Google Analytics as it is completely free. The best thing about this is you can see exactly how many people are visiting your site through your chosen keywords. You will also be able to set up goal conversions to see whether people are buying from coming to your site. You will also be able to track where people that don’t buy are leaving your site and make improvements to keep them on. This kind of tracking allows you to know exactly what your visitors are doing and what you can do to increase your conversion rate.

4. Ahead of the Curve.

The great thing about starting something now is it will put you in a great position then the economy picks up again. If you get yourself comfortably to the top then when the number of people looking to buy increases, the hits on your website will increase without you spending any more.

How to Approach Your SEO Campaign

There are 2 options for you when starting your SEO campaign. Do you do it in-house or do you hire a firm to do it.

1. In-House SEO

There are 2 ways in which to approach this. Firstly you could hire an SEO expert to work within your company. The problem with this solution is that it is out of the budget of most small businesses. The other alternative is that you get one of your current employees to learn about SEO and do some work for you. This seems like a good idea but you need to make sure your staff have the time to learn all about it properly and that they will do a consistent campaign. It is very easy to do some little bits in house but never really get a proper campaign off the ground.

2. Hire a Firm

It can be a great thing to hire a firm to help you with your efforts. Partly because they already have a wealth of experience and resources that they can pass over to you. Not to mention the fact that they will continually do research and be aware of changes in trends.

However please be aware that no SEO company can guarantee you any ranking position at all. No one has control over the search engines or what other website owners are doing. If you are guaranteed anything you should consider whether this is the right company for you.

Make sure it is very clear what you SEO company will be doing and keep track of them to make sure they are sticking to what is agreed.

Conclusion

It is important to remember that SEO efforts can start small and increase. You do not have to break the bank with a large campaign at the moment but you can begin with some highly targeted keywords at a slow pace. As things begin to pick up you can increase your efforts. However you will already have the ground work there which will put you ahead of your competitors.