By Jennifer Laycock
Search Engine Guide
Dave’s Comments (Digital Marketing Tutorial Blog): Jennifer outlines a no nonsense, down-to-earth way for small businesses to get started with, and then to get the most out of their search engine marketing efforts.
“One of the most common reasons that I hear small business owners give about why they are not undertaking search engine marketing is that it’s too much work and it costs too much money. While there’s no arguing that both time and money are involved in proper search engine marketing, many companies overlook the fact that a little bit of time and a lot of perseverance can have just as much of an impact as a lot of work up front.
The “take-your-time” approach to search engine marketing can work whether you want to take on your search marketing in-house, or even if you want to farm it out to a specialist. Here’s how it works.
Farming it out to Professional Search Marketers
While many search marketing firms prefer to do all of the optimization work for a client up front and then charge a maintainence fee for keeping an eye on the listings, there are some that are willing to be more flexible with their offerings. Some SEM firms are more than happy to take on a client on a retainer basis. The idea behind a retainer is that you are paying the company to work on your site for a certain number of hours each month. A retainer deal for organic optimization on a small site may break down like this:
1 hour a month of keyword research
2 hours a month of copywriting/editing
2 hours a month of code changing/page building
2 hours a month of link building
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7 hours a month of search marketing at anywhere from $50 – $250 an hour = $350 – $1650 a month
This type of retainer deal should get you a couple of pages of new content each month, each targeting one or two keyword phrases. It should also get you some ongoing link building, which will have a cumulative effect on helping your site rank better. The real benefit of this method is that it lets you start seeing results before you have committed a large amount of money, a true blessing for business owners that just aren’t sure about how well search marketing will work for them.”
Read the entire article on Search Engine Guide.