Small Companies Should Invest Online

When we think of companies investing in complex and sometimes costly online marketing programs, we generally think of large companies with lots of promotion money to spare. However, it might be even less necessary for a large company to use, for example, a Seattle SEO firm to improve their search engine rankings, than it is for an independent coffee shop on Phinney Ridge.

Originally, a company's Website was like a billboard on the Information Superhighway. Small business owners spent a bundle building a good web site, and they drove traffic to it by identifying it with keywords. The coffee shop, for example, might use keywords like "independent," "coffee," and "Phinney Ridge" to tell search engines what it was about. When someone wanted to have a nice hot coffee in Phinney Ridge, they would ask a search engine and the search engine would give them the coffee shop's Website.

Until recently banner ads, of versions thereof, were the main method of online advertising, and to place a banner or some other clickable item in front of a potential customer cost money. Larger companies were the first to explore online marketing with any vigor. They had the luxury to do so, since they have large budgets for promotion, and comparatively small investment could tell them how effective a new concept of marketing would be.

Money spent on banner ads drove innovation, and the promotional potential of the Internet expanded. Search engines stopped looking for keyword tags and began to look for keyword links, giving birth to modern day search engine optimization. That opened up a whole new door in online marketing, creating a new industry and dramatically increasing the effectiveness of strategic effort, such as manufacturing links to generate traffic.

Large companies were the first to try SEO after some mavericks had demonstrated its effectiveness, and because it's so effective most large companies have teams devoted to SEO activities today. With their deep pockets, they are driving strategic online marketing forward, providing a significant advantage to their brands and making life far more complicated for small independent businesses as they do.

The SEO departments of major companies start off with the goal of establishing dominance over the keywords that are most relevant to their business. When that's done, though, they don't stop. It's not in the character of that particular beast to stop. They continue to expand the keywords they want to dominate, making their sites more ubiquitous and pushing small business sites down the rankings.

Before, a small coffee shop in Phinney Ridge was only competing with one or two other coffee joints. That's no longer true. In the all-important keyword competition, it's also up against large companies, such as major coffee brands and huge online retailers. If they aren't aggressive in pursuing SEO strategies themselves their rank will fall, they will lose web traffic, and they will sell less coffee.

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..

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