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.

For a long time, a company's website was its online advertising, and companies spent a bundle on building good websites. Those websites used tags to identify them, and for the independent coffee shop on Phinney Ridge those tags would include keywords like "coffee," "shop," and "Phinney Ridge." When someone wanted to find a coffee place in that neighborhood, they'd look it up, see the website, and head down for a nice hot cup of coffee.

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.

Small slices of very big marketing budgets added up to enough money to drive innovation, and over time the marketing engines in operation online have become increasingly sophisticated and effective. Search engines have changed how they cull results, searching for keyword links instead of the keywords that were traditionally added by Webmasters, and that gave birth to search engine optimization, or SEO, which is essentially manufacturing links in order to drive 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.

That means that the small independent coffee shop on Phinney Ridge isn't only competing with other neighborhood coffee joints. It's also competing with large companies, including massive online retailers and major coffee brands. They will see their search engine rank drop steadily, not because they're doing anything wrong but because someone else is dominating all the keywords related to their business.

Therefore, while the first clients of a Seattle SEO company were probably larger corporations investing a fraction of their marketing budget in online experiments, today smaller companies need to get on the bandwagon. If they don't, they will lose their visibility online. The money they spent on that snazzy site will be wasted. As web traffic dwindles, customer traffic will dwindle as well.

I'm a search marketing professional specializing in affordable SEO services. For more resources and information, check out AudienceBloom.