Creating a marketing strategy online for small to medium size companies can become a burden. Your business may have already worked with two or three SEO companies. That experience may have left you frustrated and disappointed.
Other companies may have disappointed you before. Your rankings may not have delivered a strong ROI. Because of this, many businesses start losing faith in SEO.The key for SMB’s when choosing a SEO Company is determining what the best niche is for your company to target whether it be choosing a company, keywords, and strategy. Going after very generic keywords or to niche can be the death of your SEO Campaign.
1. ROI and Authority
Choosing your keywords can be difficult. Google doesn’t allow for a monopoly online. When choosing keywords, focus on the ones that generate the highest ROI for your business. Those list of service or goods are a good place to start your campaign around. Going national vs. regional is all based on a specific business model, budget, and expectations.
2. Competition and Budget
If you are working with a restricted SEO budget, targeting the biggest keywords in your industry may not be the smartest strategy. Competing against brands like Wal-Mart, Amazon, Dick Sporting Goods, or other Fortune 500 companies requires significant resources and planning. Large corporations often invest thousands of dollars every month into SEO campaigns, making it difficult for smaller businesses to compete directly without a strong strategy in place. Give your SEO Company a chance to succeed.
3. Social Integration and Content Creation
A lot of time companies on a restricted budget are not doing the proper Social integration or content creation within a campaign. With SEO you pay for what you get. If you choose a cheap company who is only going to link build you are not going to move up the rankings. Google is too advanced today to rank websites just because of backlinks alone. Therefore, businesses need a unique combination of on-page optimization and off-page strategies. In addition, they must build social authority and trust signals to achieve higher rankings on Google.
4. How much should you be doing?
Every SEO Company you talk to probably have a different recommendation for blogging, social media post, link building, content development, or onsite optimization. There is no generic answer to give you, but the general rule of thumb is the more content you create, the more QUALITY likes and links you generate the more opportunity your website has to be shared. Each industry is going to be different. If you are a small company in Wisconsin the chances are your competition isn’t doing to much so you can get away with doing less. If you are a Law Firm in the heart of Los Angeles you know that they have a competitive budget in place to generate the buzz to obtain the rankings.