SEO for Small & Medium Size Business - Overview - It's all about the ROI

The majority of business owners at any level these days are aware, even if only by hearsay, of the power of the internet for selling to their markets.

They understand that they need a website at least, and have usually gotten round to having one built at some point, or are thinking about getting one soon.

But in a surprisingly large number of cases, after the initial excitement of the new website going live fades, and is replaced by a continual and persistent silence from the site's contact system, people somehow convince themselves that maybe the internet is not all it's cracked up to be, and get back to their usual business.

These sites are then more or less dormant, and business owners are often skeptical of the potential value of the site to their business moving forwards.

A good way to visualise this scenario is to look at your website as just another employee, a member of your sales team.

And on the third interview of the day you get lucky. A girl walks in who is a total sales machine.

her CV lists her main attributes thus:

• Absolutely 100% dedicated and committed to your sales role.
• On 24 hour call, day and nightshift, 365 days per year.
• Able to answer any query (you train her) for with a faultless photographic memory
• Charming and persuasive, and able to get your message across, represent and sell on your behalf.
  
• Able to multi-task and take enquiries and orders from hundreds of customers simultaneously if required
• Perfect manners and composure at all times.
  

Obviously you're absolutely delighted and hire this phenomenal salesgirl immediately, knowing full well that:

"Terminator salesperson is out there! she doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And she absolutely will not stop, ever, until the last customer is sold to.."

** Note - this is effectively the case if you have employed good web designers to build your site, it is not necessarily a given, although it certainly should be.

So now, congratulating yourself on your fine recruitment techniques, do you:

a) Give her a phone, a car, a list of every past client and lead, and as much support as she needs? ..or

b) Stick her in that room in the corner, with no phone or leads and refuse to let her talk to any potential customers, and quickly lose interest in her after a couple of weeks because she didn't sell anything?

It's pretty simple really, isn't it?

Of course, nobody in their right mind would treat such an amazing asset to their business like that, ..would they?

Yet this is exactly what small businesses do with their new websites all the time.

Any good business manager will know that dedicated, enthusiastic and capable sales staff are rare, and valuable, and that having found an asset like that, you invest time and (more) into them, you nurture, train and hone them to their most efficicient state for your role, at which point the return on your investment into them will be maximised?

Well, exactly the same applies with your new automatic employee

It's basically the chicken and egg scenario now, without any sales leads, Robo-sales-girl cannot pitch to your customers, so we don't yet know how effectively she will convert leads to sales.

If you are new to SEO and don't already know your keyword market / niche well, then it's time to research it, and to get Robo started dealing with potential customers at the same time.

If you look at the screenshot to the right you will see the top three organic results for a "small business seo" search (from 2008) and above them, if you look closely you can see two "sponsored listings" or adverts.

You can put your site here for a little while, for a couple of purposes, to test how well it converts leads to sales, and to run a sample set of data to see which keywords are being searched by your customers. It is crucial to understand this information before moving any further.

1. To ensure definitely that the site does convert, and at approximately what rate
   
2. To explore how many impressions various keywords get on Google, so as to understand what the site needs to rank for.

The first of these is critical, because if you are to invest time and money into making the site visible in the organic search results, you have to know that once achieved, the site will sell, and at what rate it will sell.

The second is critical because without knowing what your buying customers are searching for, and in what volumes, how do you even begin to align the site to their search behaviour?

This all sounds very complex, but it's not. As a sharp small business owner, you should know your costs intimately. If you make, buy and / or sell widgets, you know what you pay, how much time it costs you, and what you sell for, and at what margin.

First Think in Terms of CPA - Cost Per Acquisition (Sale)

If every sale you make, makes you $100.00 gross profit, and to achieve that sale, you need to spend $50 on advertising, then the more $50s you spend, the more money you make? So you need to establish these figures for your business.

By understanding (as an example) that your site converts 1 in 100 hits into sales, and that 100 hits costs you $x.xx you can now work out your approximate (starting) CPA, and now the new employee (website) can be set Sales Targets.

And while this goes on, you will get invaluable data from the keywords section in Adwords, whcih will soon start to show you the best (most lucrative) converting keywords, it is ALWAYS desirable to have a good grasp of this information before thinking about applying Organic SEO services to a website, for obvious reasons.

Well this is going to be entirely dependent on your own circumstances, some small businesses have a perfectly viable business model based on Adwords and are content to stick to that, but in some cases this state of mind is like saying:

"Well I already have a perfectly good Ford Mondeo, what do I want an Aston Martin for?"

So you have a viable internet business sales model, you know how much your CPA is, how much traffic is there, things are ticking along nicely, so how do we improve and grow?

In some markets, where traffic is limited you will plateau fairly quickly, at for example say a $100 CPA on a $250 (profit) sale. If there is not much more in terms of volume to be had, then reducing the cost of your sale is the key. So how do you do that? - one way is by introducing SEO into the mix, organic SEO traffic, once it is there (ie after successful SEO campaign) is basically free.

Over time, the organic traffic will pick up as a percentage of your total traffic (including the adverts) and as it does, and starts to sell, it reduces your CPA accordingly. In time, you can get the organic sales and traffic to say 50/50 with paid traffic, potentially halving your advertising costs and reducing the CPA to $50 per sale, (minus of course the cost of the SEO work)

So now we can work through the figures and come to a decision about whether to invest further in SEO services for your small business. If you are spending $1000 a month for $2500 worth of sales, and you can reduce the Cost to $500 a month while holding sales steady, that's a 20% improvement in operating profit, for the same sales volume. In this example, that's an extra $6000 per year profit, and the SEO work was how much again, $3000?

Again, it's fairly simple to see that in this example, if these targets were met, you could expect approximately a 100% ROI (Return on your Investment) into SEO over the time period.

But understand that this grows exponentially when the work is done, the payments are finished, and the site keeps on performing!

You also have to remember that SEO work, once completed, does not usually require ongoing funds, unlike the Adwords traffic, which stops immediately you stop paying.

Every small business is different, and nobody knows your business as well as you do, so you need to work through this approach with your own figures and decide what is and is not viable for your own situation.

In upcoming hubs we will look in more depth at subjects covered here, setting up a basic exploratory Adwords account, basic PPC campaign management and ongoing tuning, and at setting realistic SEO goals for your site, and then attaining them.

In the meantime here's a very good video presentation going into more depth on tracking SEO campaigns and results, it would be well worth your time to watch it all.