Small business SEO basics

Small business SEO – Basic questions and their answers Search engine marketing industry is filled with myths and half truths. Every Search engine optimisation (SEO) expert believes that he or she has a secret recipe sauce that would drive traffic to his or her client’s website. Often small business owners who have no clue about what SEO is or what Pay­per­click (PPC) marketing is fall prey to tall claims by these half­baked SEO experts and lose a ton of cash. You’re required to pay them their monthly retainer to hold on to your rankings.

By educating yourself, you, as a small company owner could be in a position to ask intelligent questions before engaging an SEO specialist.

What is Organic SEO?

Organic SEO is a combination of traditional link building strategies and more recently social marketing. Link building is diverse field and there are many different ways of building links to your website. Examples are directory submission, blog commenting, press releases, text link ads etc. Organic SEO takes between 3 months – 12 months to show any improvement in your website’s rankings.

What is Blackhat and Whitehat SEO?

There are blackhat seo experts who use unethical spamming techniques and whitehat seo service providers who stick to ethical means of building links. Beware of companies that use blackhat tactics as that could jeopardize your website’s rankings.

What is Pay­per­click (PPC) advertising?

PPC advertisers choose a group of keywords or search terms that closely describe their products or services, create a short ad, setup their daily “click budget” and voila when a searcher looks for your product or company your results would appear under “sponsored listings”. How long your ad is displayed depends entirely on your budget. For quick results ( or testing) setup a small budget for clicks and start a PPC campaign. This is the best way to learn how paid advertising works.

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What are the pros and cons of Organic SEO and PPC advertising?

As mentioned earlier Organic SEO takes time to show results but the results usually last longer. With PPC advertising your ad will only be displayed as long as you keep the campaign going.

What is Ecommerce SEO and how is different from non­ecommerce seo?

Ecommerce websites usually sell products. They have lots of products for sale – with product titles, descriptions, and prices. Unfortunately this leaves little space for content. As you know search engines love content. This is a sharp contrast to non­ecommerce websites­­which have lots of content. To optimize an ecommerce site requires special set of skills be it writing product reviews on third party websites, testimonials, or social media marketing. Also the competition amongst ecommerce websites is intense­ hence is reflected in the costs of ecommerce website promotion.

How should you choose a SEO company?

SEO companies are dime­a­dozen these days. Everybody seems to be selling or making money online and considers themselves to be an SEO expert. My advice is never hire website marketing company that coldcalls. Search for “SEO Lincolnshire” if you are looking for SEO companies in Lincolnshire. Obviously you replace Lincolnshire with whatever area you are in. If you are looking for internet marketing specialists in Lincolnshire you would look up “ internet marketing Lincolnshire”. Either way speak to the seo, ask about their seo packages, past clients, references etc before making a decision.

Author :­ Thomas Barrington­Gray

Osprey seo services is a Lincolnshire, UK based Small business SEO specialist. The website can be found at http://www.internetmarketinglincolnshire.co.uk

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