Can SEO help Small Businesses in a down economy?
Can investing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) during a recession bail out the small business enterprise? Of late, SEO has gained more eyeballs after a survey pointed out that, in terms of driving primary traffic on the web, search engines are second only to email. Three reasons suggest this:
1. It costs less. 2. The return on investment (ROI) is much higher. 3. It helps you to define your market and connect to you qualified customers.
On a comparative scale, SEO gives you unparalleled ROI because it has great potential to drive the right kind of people you are looking for to your product or service and it gets your message in front of your real customers, real time, in a real language they speak. The key to this is keyword analysis and use of keywords, with the help of tools like Google Analytics (which is free to boot!).
With such web analytics tools at our disposal, we can precision track customers and end-users. Analytics tell us where visitors are coming from, including what search engines and keywords, what pages bring in the most users, which keywords have bounce and which do not, what keywords drive the most pages per visit, etc. Bottom line: SEO thus helps reboot, retool and refocus your marketing strategy so as to optimize your marketing budget in real time. More value for less money? It could define SEO.
