November 1, 2010

Can Small And Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) Put Up With The Cost Of Search Engine Positioning?



cost of website, dropping coins
SMEs can get a better return on investment in the design of their website by hiring a professional search engine optimization service to make their website appear in top positions in search engines.

Gradually, small and medium businesses are beginning to understand that in order to promote their products and services online is not enough to buy a website, but there must be some way that potential customers can find their company among the thousands of offers available on the web, that is, that they can easily find their website through popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.

The problem today for SMEs is not technological in nature but rather financial, as the cost of developing a professional website including SEO is on average 3 to 5 times the cost of a conventional website. The difference in cost is due mainly to the fact that SEO is a specialized service that requires the participation of specialists in the field, plus the number of man-hours devoted to the project are much more than in the case of conventional web design.

Some people still choose to risk getting cheated by apparently economical financial offers of positioning services that promise great things. However, bad experiences and poor results obtained by these offers of dubious credibility have made companies to increasingly stop relying on false promises and now make their decision based on proven results. The number of people who have learned that it is not necessary that their website is registered at 5,000 search engines are increasing everyday, taking into account that only 3 of them hold over 90% of the worldwide online search market. This type of arguments used by some specialized agencies not to sell location-based services are becoming less convincing because the companies are learning to differentiate effective strategies from ineffective techniques.

I believe that SMEs themselves can definitely afford the cost of a professional search engine optimization, but they must be very careful in exercising their budget, otherwise they will eventually exhaust the resources they have for the project, to invest or rather spend on a website that is generating them absolutely no business.

Here I present some practical recommendations that SMEs can take to cover the cost of a professional search engine optimization campaign:

1. Do not waste your resources - hire a professional from the very first project, this will avoid wasting part of your budget on a website which months later you'll have to get rid of because it has not yielded the expected results.

2. Find a better return on your investment - better to spend a little more on a professional website that will generate business opportunities and allow you to not only recoup your investment but also produce a profit, that to spend your money on the acquisition of a website that will not produce any benefit economically whatsoever.

3. Get the resources for the project elsewhere in the budget - maybe now it'll be more convenient for you to allocate your investment budget on online advertising with marketing campaigns rather than traditional advertising in other media such as yellow pages which have only a local scope.

4. Develop your project in stages - this allows you to make an initial investment close to the allowed budget, then to more easily justify a second investment by focusing on outcomes.

5. Be as receptive as possible - you are not a specialist in web design and you might end up implementing a conventional website if you do not hear what the experts have to say about how to promote products and services online.

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About the Blog Author: Timpa has the mission of providing all entrepreneurs, whether experiencied or not in online business strategies, with the right information to help them manage their businesses online in the best, most time-effective and cost-effective, smarter way.