Having officially been in the been in the Seo Industry for a relatively short period of time, it still staggers me how the UK SEO industry still seems to turn its nose up at SEO for small Business.
SEO conference after SEO conference runs through all sorts of great stuff about building great content, relationships and links, but with strategies that take serious amount of time and investment, which for the small business are just out of reach!
According the Federation of Small Business, at the start of 2012 there were an estimated 4.8 million businesses in the UK which employed 23.9 million people, and had a combined turnover of £3,100 billion!
Surely this is a huge business opportunity, THE biggest business opportunity the SEO industry has, so why spend so much time running through strategies that work great for the likes of Direct Line and moneysupermarket.com when in reality these are not most businesses?
My post makes 4 observations as a newbie to the industry – some maybe a little controversial?
I also make 4 predictions relating to small business SEO and where the industry will move.
Four Observations of the SEO industry
(1) An industry that had been caught cheating
I entered the Search Engine Optimisation industry that was reeling from the Google Panda and Penguin updates; from an outsider’s point of view, an industry in clean up mode – because it had been caught cheating.
Out with the ‘easy’ quick win spam tactics, and in with the ‘hard’ content is king strategies.
More than once I heard comments about how these Google changes have effectively ‘priced’ the small business out of the SEO market.
How can that be right, for isn’t SEO just about being the most relevant in your niche and just being better than the others?
(2) An SEO conference circuit not interested in Small Business?
So my first year of SEO conference attendance made me an expert in how to clear up the mess of dodgy tactics (always done by another agency!) and highly involved content and relationship building strategies.
This was all fair and good, but none of it was really relevant to small business looking to promote their business online:
Dodgy backlinks – most small businesses I’ve come across would be lucky to have more than 10 directory listings in their back link profile let alone 5000 dodgy back links from India!
Content creation strategies – maybe they will have the money to pay for a few blog posts to be written per month but that’s it!
This really just left me highly frustrated, why is the industry spending so much times talking about search engine optimisation solutions to problems not being faced by the majority of UK businesses – the small businesses?
(3) Small business SEO is not sexy!
To be honest I can understand why many people do not talk about small business SEO, it is not very sexy and the scope available to do stuff is generally much more limited.
But who cares if it’s not sexy, if this is where the market is shouldn’t we be focusing here and be getting more creative?
(4) Bad Customer Service!
My final observation relates to a separate issue, that of a poor customer service experience by many small in their dealings with companies (or local web design companies doing a bit of online optimisation).
Why do I say this:
We’re working with a large Business Grants provider who has discussed SEO with 1000’s their enquirers (who are all SME’s). THE biggest complaint about the SEO industry is poor customer service – “I just did not know what they were doing”.
So whilst this is not ‘search engine optimisation’, I do feel this is a symptom of the industry’s attitude towards small businesses, for is you value someone’s business good customers service almost comes as a matter of course.
So what do I see moving forward in the world of SEO and small business?
(1) The growth of Local SEO
Local SEO is growing, Google Trends shown a steady increase in the searches for this phrase, and the US has an expanding Local search engine optimisation market which was recently highlighted when SEOMoz bought GetListed.org, the free local directory listings checking tool.
Local SEO is really small business search engine optimisation, as the majority of small businesses will be working in a geographical radius from their location; so to me all the pointers are that this niche will grow within the UK.
(2) Move towards a more general e-marketing agency
Much of the work we now do with client’s falls out of ‘search engine optimisation’ but move into other activities and processes that will just drive more clients.
Whether it be getting a call to action on their website and free download to build their data base, to email marketing, to collecting customer reviews, to doing a company video; to helping with a press releases and more.
(3) Mapping out client activities
Small businesses generally do not have much cash, so therefore many activities will only be done if they do it.
The problem they have though is not knowing what to do, or having the structure to enable them to do these tasks quickly and efficiently.
I can therefore see the agency’s role for small business evolving to where they map out activities for the client to do, then monitor and feedback the results.
(4) Better Customer Service
As the industry matures this can only but improve; I’m sure if motorway service stations can do it the SEO industry can!
As I round off its probably worth mentioning that I’ve written this blog post to hopefully win the chance to attend Distilled’s LinkLove SEO Conference in London for free! Having a pop at the SEO Conference scene in my post was probably not the best way to enlist support for my post!!
The future’s bright, the future is small business SEO!
Would you like to take the steps needed to maximise the online presence of your small business? Simply give us a call on Tel. No. 01883 576 001 or check out the rest of http://www.localseoservices.co.uk/ and we will be happy to outline your options.
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