As a small business you might feel that SEO is one of those services that only the biggest companies and corporate groups can have in their marketing budget, but you would be wrong. SEO is for everyone and it is all about getting the write approach and strategy. The difficult thing about this idea is whittling down who actually gives you the best service and the most cost effective. There is also the issue of should I go for a company who is local and will give me local SEO services as they might be better or do I go for just a quality service overall. Either way you need a way of determining what will be best for your business and get the best return on investment.
Local SEO Companies
For some businesses, a local company is more preferable. May be they like the fact that they can go and visit the company that is doing the SEO at any time they want should they need to. It could be, like many people, they feel more comfortable knowing the company’s whereabouts and being able to visit them but never actually needing to. Whichever the case is for choosing a local SEO company, you should still need to be aware that ,just because they are local, doesn’t give them an advantage. Think about it, if you own and run a business are you overly concerned where your website is hosted? Where you get your office stationery from? Where tea bags come from? In this day and age where the service comes from doesn’t tend to affect the price as heavily as in the past. So you don’t worry because they can deliver the office pencils and tea bags. Well an SEO company that is in a completely different area to your business can deliver just as easy. As long as the company is reachable and contactable they have no reason not to be able to deliver.
Local Or Not Local
It is still a difficult conundrum as to whether you are going to use a local SEO company or not, and to be honest if it was me and I was looking after the SEO of my site, then I wouldn’t be concerned as to whether my SEO company was down the road or not. I would be overly concerned with how good they are. It is far more important for them to be a good SEO company than one that offers a local, friendly service. As an SEO company ourselves we have clients from all over the UK and some who aren’t even in the UK, but this doesn’t mean we do a lesser service for these clients and give the best service to clients in Birmingham. In fact they get exactly the same level of service. The reason is we aren’t concerned with lots and lots of clients and we don’t concentrate on the bigger marketing companies either. We concentrate on what is probably our best area – quality. We want to be honest, approachable, transparent and give the best service possible. So if we concentrate on this then clients won’t need to worry where we are based because they can see that we give them a quality service with results. This should be the same with any SEO company.
You Don’t Need a Big Budget
Just because you want SEO and you have heard all the stories of SEO being an expensive and big budget service doesn’t mean it actually is. In actual fact even local SEO services can be expensive. So when you are you looking for a good SEO company and looking for a quality one that is inexpensive you might have to be prepared to do some digging. When small businesses think about marketing it sometimes, without offending any business here, is on a small scale but naturally this makes sense. May be it’s a flyer drop in the local area and community, a local radio ad or may be even a sponsored community event. Whatever it might be it is usually centralised around the local area. But what if you are running an ecommerce site – are these really the best things to use? The reason I would say no is because you want people to visit the site and buy things. If you are giving out flyers you aren’t getting these people directly onto the site, in fact they then have to take another step and get online and look at the site. You want to them to get straight to the site and be influenced by what they see, not hope the flyer will invite them to find it on the web, but catch your audience when they search in Google for your product by appearing at the top of the results. This will work better in the long run and allow new fresh customers to get to the site. Now you might be thinking you need to be spending £1000 on your SEO work. Well you don’t, in fact you’re better off building your site up at a slower pace with great content and great links especially if your market is heavily congested.
What Should you Do as Local Company?
As a local company you probably only want to get local customers to the site, so in turn you’ll only want to get the site ranking for local type keywords – we’ve taken a similar approach with some of our keywords like ‘SEO Birmingham’. Local SEO services won’t give you a direct advantage, what it will give you is a strategy that’s right from the start. I go on a lot about quality websites and links. To make an SEO campaign truly work you want a quality service not a local one. If it was me and I knew the company in Birmingham was cost effective, did a quality service and delivered fantastic results, but I was based in Scotland, I wouldn’t hesitate to go with the Birmingham company – after all we live in a world where online communication is the most common way to get into contact. So just before you go to an SEO company, measure the service by quality not by distance.
