Invariably the next questions are always some form of “How do you do that?”

After completing graduate school I opened an ecommerce business, my thoughts were “if you build it, they will come.” Boy was I wrong…. 6 months, 2  complete overhauls of my website, $10k, and 3 Internet marketing companies later I found myself with 20k in sales, but still not enough to cover my product cost, Adwords bill and management fee.

You see, I knew I needed traffic I just didn’t know how to get traffic… I spoke with several SEO companies ranging from India to the UK and back to the US. Every person I spoke with gave me a different prognosis of what was wrong and how they were going to fix it. Their prices were astronomical, 5k per month…. 2k per month… when I asked for what I got the run around and that this mat take 6 months or more. For most of these companies, despite my ambitious dreams I simply didn’t have a fat enough wallet for them to work with me.

Sound familiar?

There seemed to be a void between the major companies and a small guy trying to get going.

I have spent nearly every free moment researching and testing different pieces of software, of solutions that promised me to push me into the number 1 position. The obvious problem is that none of it worked.

Sounding more familiar?

That was then… this is now…

Here I am 4 years later, been around the block several times and have seen a great deal and all I can say is Today….. Right Now… If you are a Business Owner “You NEED Effective SEO. Period.” Without a website and without an internet presence, you are missing one of the largest marketing opportunities that exist. With the current price of gold there is a true gold rush happening in the Yukon, however, regardless of the price of gold there is a larger gold rush happening online. It is a rush to be ranked for relevant terms, key terms that connect your business with your customers.

Let me give you an example. Suppose you’ve had a business for a couple years. Take a moment and type in a couple search terms relevant to your business to find out what information pulls up about you. Specifically look for your Google places account. Do you have one?

Google Places aggregates data about your business meaning it pulls reviews from a variety of sources (like yelp.com. yp.com, dexknows.com, hotels.com, etc). Is the information correct? Does it have pictures, comments, what are your potential clients learning about you BEFORE they even call you?

These are the types of questions that are very important to address. Managing the information that your potential customer is seeing can quickly cause someone to call you or to move on to your competitor (who is probably doing a better job than you are).

Yahoo and Bing each have their own flavor of the Google Places, “Yahoo Local” and “Bing Local” respectively. These are free resources to help you but, I must caution, it is only a starting point.

The key to doing any type of optimization is understanding what the search engines are looking for and giving them this. It’ll boil down to how well you can meet this need for relevant data more than anyone else.

If you do, then you can expect to see your business listing improve and consequently your phone will be ringing off the hook, if not, you can expect people to call you as they happen to stumble across your website or business listing which is truly a waste. After all, one in five searches is location related.

If you are interested in understanding how Top Speed SEO can help your business achieve this, contact us