There is a reason people build businesses in cities surrounded by people, rather than in a desert surrounded by cactus! You need people to market to, and you need customers coming in your door. The success of your business relies on how well you market your product or service first, and second by how well you deliver it. Very few businesses survive on word of mouth alone. But what many small business owners fail to realize is that while marketing is everything, everything you do is marketing!

Everything you do, as a small business, has an impact on your marketing message and ability to get that message out to your customer base. How/whether you answer your phones, how you reply to email messages, what you say on Twitter/Facebook, the presentation of your website, and your ability to produce satisfied customers all play a role in your ongoing marketing efforts.

How are you perceived?

My company helps business owners build and execute their web marketing strategies. But all too often, many are missing even the most fundamental marketing and common-sense business development components. We can help them online, but lacking the offline aspects, we are simply attempting to fill a bucket that has holes in it.

Perception matters. If your potential customer’s perception of you, true or not, is less than they expect, you’re going to have trouble selling them. Would you trust a mechanic with a poorly tuned vehicle? A lawyer who drives a Yaris? A contractor with a run-down office? A landscaper with an overgrown lawn?

You might, but I guarantee you’d think twice before you do. None of these things demonstrate how well any of these business owners do their job, but the perception is, if they can’t take care of themselves, how can you trust them to take care of you?

When performing link building for our clients, they are often picky about where we get links from. So are we, but they often want to get links only from high-caliber sites, when their site is somewhere below that. In link building, people will generally only link to site’s of equal or higher caliber than themselves. If you want a link from a high-caliber site, you have to be one. Otherwise, take what you can get from those below you!

The little things matter the most

Businesses purchase online marketing because they want to increase sales. But if the SEO is doing its job but sales don’t follow, there may be something else at play. Lack of business success doesn’t always fall on the marketer’s shoulders. In fact, such woes may directly be caused by how the business is being run.

The SEO’s job doesn’t include running your business. There are a lot of things that fall outside the SEO’s area that can make or break your business success, and even your search engine rankings!

As an SEO, we routinely try to help our clients in areas that fall far outside the SEO box. We’ll provide feedback on design, programming and presentation, just to name a few. We want our customers to succeed, and sometimes that means we have to help in areas that we were not necessarily hired for.

Everything matters, and when it comes to business success, everything should be on the table for a discussion on how to improve your ROI. If your SEO thinks your design isn’t great, it may be worth discussing in greater detail, even if you love it. There might be a reason they hate it that goes beyond personal preference. If your SEO provides a recommendation on how something looks or appears on the website, it many worth noting, even if you can’t change it right away.

Little things can create big perceptions. Especially when it comes to usability issues. It’s not just website design, it’s also communication, problem resolution, response times and a whole lot more.

A picture on your website may be worth a thousand words, but perception is worth 1001. You are what you’re perceived to be. That’s true whether you believe it or not.

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While the ease of which one can start a business online is great for life, liberty and the pursuit of sticking it to the man, it can also have its drawbacks. Just like starting a 100 mile sprint may be easy, finishing is another thing altogether. Every business must still follow basic business principles of success in order to attain a long and profitable life.

Your business’ place in history

Mom and Pops have been around since Abel sold Cain a little something from his road-side pets-and-rocks stand. Since then, the stronger guys have been using their leverage to force the little guys out of business. But the Internet provided a way for the little guy to fight back. It leveled the playing field and became a place where David could slay Goliath.

Due to their flexibility, lack of red tape, and ability to make decisions without forming a super-committee, Mom and Pops were the first to really use the internet as a sales channel. In fact, they were what initially fueled the growth of the Internet as they found ways to compete that were previously unavailable to them. Their corporate counterparts lagged far behind for many years.

Many mom and pops were able to use the internet to grow their small businesses to be medium-size companies and, in some cases, large corporations. Jeff Bezos started a small online bookstore and turned it into one of the largest online retailers in the world, Amazon.com. Amazon is a stiff competitor to Wal-mart (which also started as a Mom and Pop) and is, in part, responsible for the demise of Borders Bookstores. (Ultimately, Borders demise was Borders’ own fault. “Adapt or die.” They didn’t do the former so the latter snuck up on them!)

But not all Mom and Pop owners have ambitions of turning their start-up into a billion-dollar behemoth. Getting bought out by Google for $3.1 billion is rarer than some people may believe! Many Mom and Pops are content to shoot for something slightly less ambitious, or even desire to stay small so they can maintain their flexibility, freedom and live life without all the stress.

Your business’ place online

Small businesses continue to move online to find their place of success. But so are larger corporations. Maintaining the online success that was easy to achieve ten years ago has become more and more difficult.

The barrier for creating a web presence gets smaller with free tools like WordPress and Facebook, yet competitors, both small and large, are investing increasingly larger amounts of marketing dollars into their online campaigns. What seemed like a large investment five years ago is only a fraction of what many companies are spending today.

While starting a business on the Internet today is still relatively easy compared to doing so off-line, building a successful business has become more expensive and time consuming than ever. For many small business owners, the cost of SEO is getting out of reach.

A good SEO consultant or firm might cost between $100 and $500 per hour. Employing a full-scale SEO campaign can run anywhere from $12,000 on the low end to $100,000 or more per year, all depending on the industry and how badly you want to beat the crap out of your competition (figuratively speaking). Be careful, your competition fights back. A small twig doesn’t do much damage against a competitor holding a club!

SEO costs like those mentioned above may be chump change for large corporations, but they do make the online environment a less viable marketplace for new businesses on limited budgets. This is why do-it-yourself SEO articles are so popular. Why pay someone to change your oil when you can get dirty, ruin your clothes and scream curses at your car all on your own! (A little insight as to why I don’t change my own oil.)

But even do-it-yourselfers eventually run into the ROI factor. It may be cheaper to do it yourself, but the return on the time invested is just not there in the long run.

Your business’ place with your competition

It’s no longer easy for small businesses to achieve easy online success. That’s not to say the Internet is no longer a welcome place for those with grand dreams of starting their own business and making it big. It’s just that the competitive landscape must be duly considered before making the leap. Those who already have an established online presence have the advantage. New sites take more time to build the authority and reputation that is necessary to push past the mainstays.

There is really no reason why a new site should outperform an older site in the same industry that has already established trust and reputation online. The only way to overcome that is to beat them – not by manipulating the algorithms, though that can work for a time – but by making your site more valuable, reputable and trustworthy than your competition. Being unique helps too!

But just because you’re the mainstay doesn’t mean that you can’t be out-performed in the rankings. As long as your new competitors are willing to build a site that is more valuable, reputable and trustworthy than yours, they have a shot at being competitive. And the more money they invest in making that happen, the greater the opportunity they have in overcoming those that are spending less.

If you’re comfortable staying a Mom and Pop shop, this won’t concern you much. If your dreams are bigger than that, you need to be doing more than monitoring your competitors. You need to be outsmarting (and in some cases outspending) them.

Your business’ place in marketing

If you’re fine being a small fish in a big pond, then you’re also fine not having top 10 results in the search engines. And if you’re not fine with that reality, then you need to adjust your goals. Not every hardware store can compete with Lowe’s or The Home Depot, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t be successful. You don’t need to be #1 to make a comfortable living!

However, if your ambitions are greater than staying a small company, you have to think like the big fish. You may not be able to compete against The Home Depot today, but you certainly won’t get there until you create an online marketing game plan that factors in higher budgets year after year. The Home Depot spends millions in marketing. Good luck beating them with your paltry $1000 per month campaign!

To be considered a competitor you need to change your drive, motivation and financial investment. Look to apply similar online marketing strategies and tactics, even on a lesser scale for now, but plan for growth until you’re matching or exceeding what your competitors are doing.

Even though the barriers to starting a business online are still less than starting one off-line, the mindset of success shouldn’t be. Earning first-page placement for your keywords requires much more than throwing up a website. You must be willing to invest in whatever it takes to overcome your competition. More determination, more effort, more patience and more marketing.

If you don’t know what or where your place is as a business, your marketing efforts will find it for you. You can complain about Google, argue with your SEO or rub a magic lamp, but until you’re ready to make a serious play for the next level, your marketing plan will put in your place, which is right where you belong.

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Keyword Integration

I talked a bit about integrating keywords into your content in the last post, but let’s provide a little more background and context for how best to do that and what, exactly, it means.

Search engines don’t read. They are not really looking for “keywords” as we seem to think, but instead they look for word duplication and context similarities on any given page. The search engines see a bunch of words, and within that content a few repeated words stand out. This gives the search engines clues as to what the topic of the page might be.

But when you add too many topics (keywords) to a page, the search engines can become confused. Or, actually, the topic becomes diluted and makes it difficult for the search engines to determine exactly what the page topic might be.

However, if all your keywords are variations of your primary page topic, you can see how the search engines really begin to understand the topic of the page because all the other keywords and content reinforce that particular topic.

The moral of the story here is to make sure your content is focused on a topic and use only keywords that reinforce that topic. You can target a lot of keywords on a single page, provided you keep those keywords tightly focused together.

Use Images to Draw Visitors Into Content

Images can greatly enhance your content and improve it’s readability. While your content can be intellectually interesting, images make it visually appealing. Look at the difference between the recipes site shown in the image above and the one below:

Using images can make quite a difference, much like the difference between walking into a restaurant and smelling the scent of the table cleaner versus smelling a sizzling steak on the grill. The food may taste the same, but one of those two restaurants will have far more appeal than the other.

Media Integration to Strengthen Your Message – Photos

Because web content is no longer static, but it all has (or should have) a social element to it, it is increasingly important to go beyond just adding images to your content, whenever possible. Photos in particular add the capability of creating a social component to any valuable piece of content.

Integrating your photos to or from Facebook or Flickr, or other social photo services, allows for increased interaction and tie-ins from a number of different areas where your audience might be lurking. One of the goals of social content is to reach your audience where they are, not where you think they are (or should be). By using photo integration, you are not only making your content more visually appealing, but allowing your audience to find you wherever they socialize.

Media Integration to Strengthen Your Message – Video

Video is huge online. Google’s YouTube is the second most used search engine. People spend hours every week watching videos online in favor of traditional media entertainment. But, not only are they using video to entertain themselves, they are looking to video as a way to learn.

Search “how to” anything on YouTube and you’re likely to find a video on that topic. When you do a search on Google, if they have any videos that they feel are relevant, they’ll include those in the search results along with standard web pages. Video gives you additional avenues to be explored and possibly incorporated.

Any opportunity you have to include video in your content should be grabbed. Especially if it’s your own video. However, even if you use someone else’s video, integrating it into your content can provide additional context or clarity, and bolster your content’s readability.

Not everyone will take the time to watch a video, but providing the option for those that will reaches out to a new segment of your audience. Plus, you still have the written content for everybody else!

Add Links

Once you have people’s eyes on your content, what now? Do they just read and go about their merry way? Or do you have something that you want them to do? Aside from the call to action that should be on the page, you might also want to speak to those that are not yet convinced or ready to take action. The best way to do this is to add links to other pages of your website.

Links provide a way for visitors to continue to engage with your website without having to “figure out” where they should go or what they should do to get more information. If you mention something in your content that is further explained somewhere else, link to it! If you have a resource that backs up your claims, link to it! If you mention an organization that re-reinforces your claims of superiority, link to that, too!

Links also provide a great way to add optimization into your content. Every linked “keyword” to another page gives the search engines an additional clue as to what that linked page is about. So don’t ever use “click here” as your link text; instead, use your the keywords relevant to the page being linked to.

The more links you have, the more traffic you can drive to other areas of your site. Without those links, you may be losing visitors that otherwise might remain engaged. However, there does come a point when you can have too many links!

How To Please Everyone

People from every segment of your audience are going to have specific ways they interact with your content. Some people are scanners, and some are readers. Some are visual, and some are intellectual. Some want depth, and others want to keep it light and easy. But that doesn’t mean you can’t provide a method of interaction for (almost) everyone!

The three key areas to focus on to please as many people as possible are: how it looks visually, how it reads textually and what it says semantically.

Visually: If you strip everything out of your web page but the content, how does it look? Do you just have a bunch of words broken into paragraphs? Or do you integrate elements that make your content more digestible? Simply adding paragraph headings, bullet points, links and bolding key concepts can make your content much easier to read, scan and digest. Look for opportunities to break your content into smaller bites.

Textually: Keep your content focused on your point. Try not to meander, unless its done strategically. Make sure you speak in terms of how your customers will benefit rather than about how great you are. Writing from the customer’s point of view can go a long way to persuading them you have what they need. When necessary, link to supporting information, even if it isn’t on your site. Third-party verification reinforces your value.

Semantically: Keywords are your audience’s language. Use them. Keep your writing active rather than passive. This keeps the reader engaged and ready to take the next action possible. Be sure to include calls to action that reinforce the next step in the process. For some that’s a conversion, but for others that’s simply more information. Use multiple forms of call to action to keep the reader engaged.

See all posts in this series:

Part 1: Intro / How Print Audience Differs from Web Audience
Part 2: Goals of Online PR
Part 3: Background Research

Part 4a: Crafting the Story p1

Check out E-Marketing Performance for more articles by Stoney deGeyter

There are lots of things small businesses can do. I’ve mentioned some of them in ways to promote your small business for free and promote your small business for $888. But once we get past the basics, unless the small business owner has time to devote themselves to learning and implementing SEO, it’s almost a necessity to have someone on staff or to hire a consultant.

Probably the biggest hurdle for most small businesses is site design and site architecture. They will choose a web designer who is, at best, ignorant of SEO best practices or who, at worst, gives them bad or outdated SEO advice. I can’t tell you how many visually stunning small business websites I’ve seen over the years that are so image heavy, they are invisible to search engine spiders or, worse, are completely uncrawlable, And let’s not even bring up the subject of flash.

For small business owners with limited time resources and/or limited budgets who can’t hire a full time consultant to work directly on their project, my advice is to arrange a telephonic consultation with someone. Find a consultant who will have a weekly/bi-weekly/monthly call with you and your team (hopefully with someone who can make the changes needed). The arrangement should include an initial review or site audit. Every call should include a review of the last call, any changes to be made, and a review of any new development or changes in the SEO world. Lastly, the call should include discussion about plans for the future.

What types of future planning should your consultant talk with you about?

• Content creation: Blogging, how-to articles, Linkbait, etc.
• Link building: What are you doing to build links, how can you target higher quality links.
• Social Media: Social media is filled with opportunies for small businesses.
• Media,Press, and Public Relations: These are all part of your overall marketing strategy, and your SEO should give you recommendations about how to maximize the SEO value from it.
• Technical Issues: Hopefully after the initial review these will be minimal, but things do crop up from time to time.

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Understanding expectations for business growth is important for any business owner. If you don’t have some idea of what to expect, you’re kinda flying blind. You can’t plan, budget, or hire, unless you have an idea of what’s coming down the way.

Setting client expectations isn’t easy. We live in a sales oriented world and people want to hear how you’re going to bring them vast sums of wealth with the magical arts of SEO. Unfortunately, it’s never that easy.

This client’s first site had dramatic success when we took over their SEO several years ago. Of course they are in a niche industry, and this was in the early days of SEO. But, we’ve successfully fought back some pretty high-profile competitors over the years.

The new site is in a much bigger niche, and therefore more competitive. Some of the same companies that compete against the first site also compete here, but because of the popularity of the niche, the competition is much more fierce. In addition to that, the competition is also firmly established now, so the game has changed, and the recipe for success is different than before.

I’ve explained all this to the client so they don’t have the same expectations as before. They simply can’t.

But, they still want to know something. They have a business to plan for and want to know if they can expect to make a profit the first year. They need to be found on the search engines and social platforms.

Therein lies the problem. They wanted to be aggressive, so we laid out an aggressive plan of attack that included SEO, link building, social media, and even pre-promotion, to get the ball rolling early. But, the cost for all that was too high for them, so they scaled it back considerably.

I get that… budgets are important. You can’t over-spend and expect to stay afloat. But, with online marketing, you can’t under-spend and expect to move up in the search results quickly.

Over the years, this client has kept an eye on the competition. When they feel that someone is closing in on them, they let me know, and ask what we are going to do about it to make sure they keep their positions. Well, there is only so much we can do within the budget allotted. So far we’ve done a great job of holding them off, but it’s just a matter of time that someone with deeper pockets, or at least willing to spend more on SEO, will come along. That’s a tough battle to fight.

The investment factor is just as important as any other in SEO. You can hire the best SEO in the world, but if you’re only paying them a few hundred dollars, they won’t be able to build success from that. You might get some good tips and advice, but it won’t be a full-scale SEO plan.

Even if you’re spending several thousand dollars a year on SEO, you eventually reach your limit of what you can achieve. That investment is good for so many hours, and those hours will only take you so far.

Periodically, the client keeps coming back to me asking for an expectations update. I am trying to give them the information they need, but it’s difficult. The on-page SEO will be an ongoing process. We’ll do as much as their budget allows. It’ll be solid, but limited by hours.

It is important to note that this client also took social media and link building into their own hands. So a lot depends on how they handle those aspects in-house and how aggressive they are; whether they attack it correctly or are just self-promoting (which doesn’t go over so well in social media). It also depends on whether they are just pumping out social content or actually engaging with the community.

A lot is also riding on them implementing the SEO recommendations. With the first site, there are still things we have been struggling to get implemented that are crucial, but we keep getting rebuffed. Again, for them it’s a time/money issue. The cost of making architectural and CMS changes can be significant. But, the cost in lost momentum can be greater.

Ability, time, and willingness to invest in your SEO is crucial. The success of a business doesn’t just rely on the SEO, or just the social media, or any one other thing. It relies on a combination of many things that all need to work together. And, it relies on how aggressively each of those will be pursued.

So, is setting client expectations difficult? It sure is. Does that mean we can write it off? Nope. Clients need to know these things, so take your best shot! Just keep in mind that expectations are a crap shoot. There are so many factors at play. But, you’ll always have your best chances of success if you move forward aggressively.

Comments

What do all of these companies have in common? They all want to grow, but are pulling back on their investments when they should be investing more.

Let’s take a look at each of these to dissect where they are going wrong.

One More Step to Conversion

The first company will definitely get some traction from increases in Social Media efforts. But, with a site that isn’t fully optimized, they are pouring water into a leaky bucket. I’m certain that they’ll build some brand name recognition, see their traffic increase, and make more sales as a result of increasing their Social Media budget. But, will it be the same amount of increased traffic and sales if had they kept their SEO budget in tact?

Hard to say, but my guess is no.

Social Media is a great vehicle to drive relevant traffic and build links. Like a good infomercial, it gets people’s interest. SEO is about attracting those who are already interested. The difference between the two is huge. With Social Media, you have an additional layer of conversion. You have to get them interested and then make them want to buy, and then convince them to buy from you. With SEO, they are already interested, and you just simply show them that you have what they want.

The process of optimization is building a site that gives searchers more of what they want. You want to make sure your site meets their needs, not just peaks their interest.

Saving Money Means Having More Money to Lose

The second company, the one pulling their PPC and bringing it in-house, is also likely to lose ground. Not that there is anything wrong with doing things in-house, unless of course you really don’t have the knowledge, skill, or manpower to handle it. And, that is the case here. From what I understand, the hourly rate this company was being charged had not changed in the last 5 years. The company managing their account, at long last, wanted to bring the rate in line with their current pricing. For the company being managed, the new “expense” is just too much.

What’s likely to happen is, as their in-house team struggles to learn the ins and outs of PPC, they’ll start to see their click troughs decrease and cost per clicks jump. It won’t happen overnight, but unless they have the time to invest fully into their PPC knowledge and management skills, and include ad and landing page testing, their campaigns will begin to suffer, as most inactively managed campaigns do.

In the attempt to save a few dollars, any savings will be lost in poorer PPC campaign performance. Instead of a campaign that continually increases profit, it’ll stagnate, at best, and lose money, at worst.

Moving Forward Isn’t Always Progress

The last company has a good SEO campaign going, and they have been advised for some time to engage in Social Media, a plan which they have back-burnered for years. Only recently have they begun moving forward with it. The problem is, that even though they know about Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, and the like, they have no idea how to leverage them properly.

In sports terminology, they know who their best players are, but they don’t know what positions they play, or, for that matter, how to create a winning play using each player properly. Will they figure it out? Well, they may manage to stumble along long enough to learn a few tricks. But, will their Social Media profiles be optimized to reach the most people the quickest? Highly doubtful.

When moving forward with Social Media, the set-up is the most crucial part. Setting it up wrong is like building a house on sand. It works great for a while… until you realize that you need a better foundation. The whole house has to be moved, and that’s not an easy task, nor does it always allow for a seamless transfer. And, often times, pieces get lost along the way.

They’ve already made a number of rookie mistakes that, if not corrected, will cost them dearly later on. Again, they are saving a few dollars by having their in-house employee get their Social Media together, but this is no expert. It’s someone who’s knows how to use Social Media, but not how to market with it. That’s like hiring a coach based on his extensive experience watching sports on TV!

Online marketing is no little league game. This is the big leagues. Whether it’s SEO, PPC, or Social Media, you can’t play tee-ball when you are trying to compete in the majors. If you’re lucky, holding back on your online marketing investments can prevent you from building up the momentum you need to overcome your competition. If you’re not lucky, it’s gonna cost you a lot more money to fix it later than to do it right to begin with… right NOW. That’s not just money lost, that’s more profits lost too.

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Even if your business as little commercial viability online, having an accessible website allows people to learn more about you, your products or services, what types of things you do, what you believe in and care about, and how to contact you if needed. It’s about allowing people to come to you instead of pushing yourself on to them that is typical of most forms of advertising.

If you run a business of any size and you still have not made the jump to the Web, why not? If you know your business can make money online, (i.e. you sell an in-demand product or service) then investing money to build your web presence is almost a no-brainer. The question then becomes, how to do it right so you can be profitable.

If you run one of those niche businesses where online success isn’t a certainty, there is still value in being online. There is also value in investing in a bit of marketing in order to make sure your site can be found by those looking to find you, even if they just seek information.

Regardless if your business that can make a profit online or if the site’s just another way to provide information to the public, there are a few things that you’ll want to consider when budgeting for your website’s success.

Web Hosting

Web hosting can be considered a utility expense as it’s just another bill you pay each month to keep things moving forward. Just as lights are essential to a brick and mortar store, without good web hosting your site goes dark.

However, investing in web hosting services isn’t as easy as paying an electric bill and plugging the light in. As long as the electric bill get’s paid the lights stay on. With web hosting you have many levels of quality, starting with server space, speed, bandwidth, and any extras you might need to ensure you provide your visitors with a good experience. Web hosting can cost as little as $5/month, but those don’t have the reliability that most businesses need.

Before you select your web host company or package, you need to get a good idea on what your needs will be. Will the server be able to handle the regular every day traffic? What about sudden spurts of traffic from popular articles or advertising campaigns? Will bandwidth restrictions slow down your site’s performance or ensure that every visitor can access all of your content without download delays?

There are dozens of factors involved in site hosting and you’re better off comparing on quality than on price. To keep your site live and accessible, quality trumps price every time.

Web Design

Building a pretty website is relatively easy to do for any artistic person. But pretty doesn’t necessarily translate into web success. Many designs that look pretty are also poor performers in terms of visitor usability and search engine friendliness. These are important things to consider when in the design and development stage of your site.

Things such as color integration, navigation layout, site architecture are all just as important–if not more important–than the actual design of the site. Hiring a web designer that only makes pretty sites but ignores some of the other important aspects of web usability is like hiring a painter to build a good car. Sure they can paint one, but there is nothing under the canvas.

Like a pretty car needs a good engine under the hood, a pretty website needs good code, usability and architecture in order for it to be able to perform for you online. Before you hire any designer make sure they have the skills to do more than make your site look good. Make sure they know how to make it perform good as well.

Functionality

Each business has different needs. And what the business owner needs her website to do will vary greatly. More often than not you’ll have to go beyond the basic design and usability elements to build a site that has the functionality that you want.

What do people want to do once they get to your site? Are they looking to place an order? Read content? Ask a question? Research and compare products or services? Each of these actions require that a system be built in order to accommodate it. Those systems cost money, and depending on how detailed that system needs to be, the more money it might cost you.

Proper web budgeting needs to consider all of the additional “whistles and bells” that you want to add to your site. Figure out what you need versus what you want but isn’t absolutely necessary. Once you know how much things cost then you can focus your budget on what is most essential first.

Search Engine Optimization and Marketing

I’m often concerned at how many people seemed surprised that SEO and web marketing costs more than building the site itself. The site, aside from needed functionality improvements, is generally a one-time expense. Marketing is an ongoing expense.

Making a website perform in the search engines is just one aspect of marketing, but an important one for online success. Most business can’t get buy just by renting space and opening the doors. They have to do some form of advertising and marketing. The same is true online. And if the marketing is what’s creating sales, its a much needed investment, so long as the ROI is there.

Any marketing you do online needs to provide you with a positive return on investment. This is can be quickly accomplished with PPC. SEO can often take months for the ROI to be realized. But that’s just the nature of this type of work. Once the SEO campaign begins to take root the ROI is generally greater than what you’ll see for PPC campaigns.

When budgeting for online marketing it’s not always a choice between SEO or PPC. It’s often just a matter of strategy. It often makes sense to get the PPC campaigns going while the SEO is being implemented and still building into a positive return. Both campaigns can compliment each other satisfactorily.

Building a successful site online doesn’t have to be expensive, but it will cost money if you want to do it right. But it’s not about how much money you spend but how well you plan and how wisely you spend.

There is no way to provide estimates on how much all this should cost because it’s different for every business, depending on the specific needs. But a little bit of research will help you find the best value for your dollar (again, cheapest isn’t always the best value) that will provide you the results you need without breaking your budget.

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One of the things many businesses struggle with is how to really make their site stand out. Many of us have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of online competitors. Some are serious competition, some not-so serious, and some not yet even on the radar, but will soon become major players for “our” space. The truth is, everybody wants to be #1 and there is only one #1 position.

Why do you really deserve to be #1?

Destination SEM isn’t about getting that #1 position. With more and more space in the “blended” search results being given to video, images, blogs, etc. getting the #1 position isn’t a priority. What is a priority is getting increased visibility for your important keywords. You don’t have to be #1 to be successful, but you do have to stand out from your competition.

Many businesses I talk to want to be #1 but simply cannot tell me why they deserve to be. They don’t know what it is about themselves that truly sets them apart from their other online competitors. What makes them stand out? Why would the search engines give them preference over the dozens, or even hundreds of other competitors looking to gain tracking in the same space?

The simple reason for that should be because you, as a business, provide something that cannot be found anywhere else.

That’s not as far reaching as it sounds, and it certainly isn’t all that difficult. It just takes a lot of time and creativity. There really is no limit to what you can do that will set you apart, but here are four quick points to consider to help you toward your destination:

Offer something unique: It’s not an issue that you do the same thing that dozens of others do. You just want to do it differently. In a marketplace filled with the same products from site to site, you can find products or create a niche that currently isn’t being tapped into. Here you have a chance to become an expert in a very specialized field where there are no other experts.

Be interesting: Blandness abounds on the web. That gives you an opportunity to create yourself an identity that stands out from the rest. You can do this with your website design, the content on your pages, or how you package your products or services. Don’t be afraid to break the boundaries for your industry.

Be compelling: There are a number of places on the web to get information. But very few places to find current, up to date or little-known nuggest. By providing these tidbits of data you prove to your audience that you keep current with trends and tools that are pertinent to the service or products you sell. Package this information in a way that it easy to find and even easier to digest and you’ll build a very strong customer base.

Provide something valuable: Become the de facto expert and go-to site for your industry. Build a vast resource of information that goes beyond just the products or services you offer specifically. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of competing products or services, add links to other resources, write helpful tutorials and upload how-to articles and videos. By providing value to your visitors you create a site that can be trusted and build a long-term customer base.

Visitors want to love you. Help them!

There are several key areas that you can focus on with your website that will help you create something unique, special and wonderful for your visitors and that will give them something to believe in!

Content: Make your content stand out. Provide information that can’t be found elsewhere in ways that isn’t provided anywhere. Make it fun, enjoyable and educational.

Presentation: Don’t just use words. Use words, graphics, images and anything else you can to help you get your point across in an engaging way.

Interaction: Interact with your audience. Don’t create a one-way communication but find ways to get them participating in the conversation. Use comments, feedback forms, email and general discussion to make them feel a part of the conversation.

Resources: Provide additional resources. Link out to other sites, articles, and items of interest. Build your reputation for knowing where the other experts are.

On-site experience: Overall, you want them to walk away having had a genuine experience on your site. The more involved, engaged and invested they are in your site the better experience they’ll have all together.

The bottom line is if you are just doing what hundreds of others are doing, offering nothing truly unique, then you don’t deserve to be #1. In fact, if you’re no different than anybody else then you deserve no special recognition whatsoever. But if you want top exposure, if you want to stand out from all of your competitors, then you have to make the effort to go beyond what everybody else is doing.

No amount of optimization can make you unique among your peers. That’s somethign you have to do for yourself.

Read more about Destination Search Engine Marketing:

Part I: Do you Deserve Top Search Rankings?
Part II: What Would Sudden Exposure Get You?

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