Most business owners know that they need to advertise. The trouble with advertising in the traditional sense is that it is difficult to know whether your efforts are working and what is generating the best value for your dollar. When your budget tightens it is even harder to justify the cost when the results are not accurately measurable or controllable.

But marketing on the web is different. The costs are lower, return on investment can be much higher and traffic data allows you to optimize your budget. Search engines are a primary driver of traffic on the web. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), as a result, has received an increasing amount of well-deserved attention.

For most small businesses, SEO is new. Some have considered it, and even done a bit of research on the topic, but not invested in SEO or SEM. Others have invested in SEO or SEM in the past and found themselves disappointed with the results. A few have found real success. In this economy, why should a company consider a new marketing channel like search marketing when they’re already looking to cut their budget? What about the risks involved in a new? What if it doesn’t work? These are all valid questions. For those who spend most of their time building and maintaining their businesses, reading up on what makes search engines work is unlikely. Understanding SEO enough to truly leverage it for growth can seem a long way off. That's why you need someone to manage your search marketing efforts. In addition to my knowledge and experience I have other clients who will discover diffeent obstacles and opportunities either before you, or on a different scale than you and I bring that to your efforts.

So why SEO, and why now?

1. Unparalleled ROI

A MarketingSherpa survey of 3,053 client-side marketers determined that SEO was viewed as the most valuable marketing solution in terms of ROI, even higher than email marketing to in-house email lists. ROI is everything - especially in uncertain economic times.

2. Targeted Traffic

Traditional marketing/advertising options often have you publishing an advertisement in a place where you’re hoping it will get a lot of eyeballs. That’s great, but the real question is: which eyeballs? Are they the right people? Do they want or need what you’re offering? With SEO, up front keyword research can tell you a lot about your target audience and what kind of language they’re using. When you choose your keywords and then optimize for them, you’re addressing an existing need or desire - and you know that at least a good portion of visitors referred from search engines through your target keywords are looking for exactly what you’re offering. SEO helps to drive high quality traffic to your website and gets your message in front of the right people at the right time.

3. Precise Tracking

Web analytics allow you to track your users with a great deal of accuracy. Google Analytics will tell you where visitors are coming from (including what search engines and keywords), what pages bring in the most visitors, what keywords have the lowest bounce rates (the measure of users who immediately leave your site after viewing one page), what keywords drive the most pages per visit and average time on site and a whole lot more. With basic conversion tracking you can even tie keywords to conversion rates - an incredibly valuable way to identify the most valuable keywords and focus on them. With web analytics you can take granular look at your visitors and optimize your marketing budget in real time.

How should you approach SEO?

If you’re considering investing in SEO as a marketing channel there are two basic options:

1. Take the SEO work on in-house

2. Hire an agency or consultant and outsource SEO

The In-House Option

Hiring for an in-house SEO position is often out of the budget range for small businesses - in this economic climate especially. Existing employees, on the other hand, can play an important role - especially those who are already regularly updating your website. It requires careful research, planning and execution, but with the right training and guidance much of the work required can be handled in-house.

The Outsourcing Option

Hiring an SEO professional to either handle the full scope of work or to consult on research and strategy and delegate to your web developer makes sense in many situations. SEO professionals usually spend a great deal of time researching strategies and tactics and compiling resources - all of which can help you hit the ground running with your SEO campaign. But you need to find the right person.

So let’s be clear: no SEO professional can guarantee you rankings or growth. If they tell you they can, they’re being either dishonest or foolish, or both. The bottom line is that SEO experts don’t control the search engines. Changes to Google’s algorithm can, and usually do, come unannounced. That is out of our hands, but we do know what to do when that happens and how to recognize that change in indexing.

SEO is scalable - you don’t have to throw your entire budget into it. Sometimes just taking a few small steps here and there over time adds up to success. Other times you need a one-time overhaul of your site, or maybe a long-term relationship with an expert who can help chart the course. It will depend on the goals you set for your website and how realistic they are given the limits of time and resources. But search engines are going to remain the primary driver of traffic and sales on the web for the forseeable future. SEO, for that reason, shouldn’t be an afterthought to your marketing plan, even in tough economic times - indeed, with such a high potential return on your investment, it should be a priority.