Keeping up with SEO on a shoestring budget

HYDERABAD, INDIA: Though small business owners understand what a SEO or SEM tool can do to extend their reach and visibility to the target customers, they often find it difficult to invest time and money on it.

Udayan Bose, founder, NetElixir tells the ways small businesses can improve their page rank and visibility without burning deep holes in their pockets.

CIOL: How can SEO and SEM activities help small business?

Udayan Bose: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) enable SMBs maximize return on their marketing dollar. It is an inexpensive but highly effective way of acquiring new customers and extending their reach to customer segments that are difficult to reach through conventional advertising channels.

However, online marketing needs expert management. Unfortunately, our research shows that in most cases they get one of their relatives or friends who claims to know website design, work on optimizing their website. In 99 percent of cases, this does not deliver any results. Reasons being, lack of expertise and experience. In most cases, the website rankings go from bad to worse.

A great case to the point is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - and theoretically, SEO is free. However, it is needless to mention that every site wants to rank on the first page of Google. On an average any website competes with a few thousand (if not hundred thousand) websites for getting listed on Google for any keyword. Unless they have an exceptional SEO expert in their team, this is going to be very difficult.

CIOL: Small businesses are concerned that SEO are too expensive for them. Is DIY approach helpful for them?

UB: SMBs do not have to pay anything to Google or Bing for SEO. But, since every website wants to appear on the first page of Google search results page, the competition is extremely high. Research shows that only 21 percent of all searchers go beyond the first search results page. So, if the business website is not listed on page 1 (or 2), the chances of searchers noticing it is remote. What's the use of having a website that no one can find!

Small Businesses have two options -

1. Spend time to become SEO expert and make website tweaks so that their website appears on top.

2. Hire and expert SEO agency - pay them a hefty fee to get their website optimized. Both these options are expensive and time consuming and very few (if any) SMBs can afford it.

CIOL: Do you have a solution that meets this challenge?

UB: We have seen that small businesses are willing to pay for the SEO tool as long as it helped them solve their SEO problem - ‘What do I do to rank high on Google'? All they want is a simple yet powerful set of SEO tools that could be used by a non-technical user.

Keeping this in mind, we have built LXRSEO - a small business SEO tool kit and task manager to address this challenge. This unique DIY web tool has a powerful daily task recommendation engine that specifies the appropriate task that needs to be done on any day. It grades the SMB's website on 25 factors, recommends daily tasks and measures progress, tracks results at individual keyword level and compares with competitors and generates actionable weekly reports that can be easily understood by any small business owner.

CIOL: As users drift towards mobile, do you see an uptick in mobile SEO? How effective is it for the small businesses?

UB: About 15 percent of all searches in 2013 will happen from mobile devices. However, 99 percent of the websites are not optimized for mobile devices. As a result of which, most searchers leave the website almost immediately. This is huge gap that needs immediate correction. Mobile friendly websites are the first step towards mobile SEO. The demand-supply gap offers a unique opportunity for small businesses to take advantage of the mobile usage boom.