Small Business Online Marketing WITHOUT SEO? Absolutely.

OK, put the guns down and hear me out BEFORE the public execution begins over such an outrageous statement.

So here's why SEO could be a total waste of time for a small business or home business entrepreneur, namely, you:

Unless you have invented a time machine, time is finite.

Limited.

Valuable.

All of us entrepreneurs have many demands on our time (and money) and in this time-poor lifestyle, why should we allocate vast time (and financial) resources to SEO and boosting our rank on Google?

Right about now, the SEO guys here are turning red with rage and phoning up hit men.

And by SEO, I mean consultants and firms who work on aspects of your landing page/s and site/s to make them rank higher in Google et al. Obviously there can be other threads to SEO (like the testing of conversions etc on your landing pages, more on that below) but Search Engine Placement is the MAIN, not only, but MAIN point of SEO not SEM which IS very valuable.

But let's consider a different approach for a moment.

Most small business entrepreneurs simply do not have the time or financial resources to compete with bigger business who have full-time consultants or firms working constantly on their SEO to bump up their Google place a notch or two.

What I propose is a marketing model quite different and one that I hope gives you back some time and money.

At heart, I'm a guerrilla marketer driven by cost-effective (including time, not just money) results-driven tactics and strategies and to be blunt, I'm too technically illiterate to appreciate a lot of the nuances of say, H1, H2 and H3 codes or whether your Java is inside or outside your HTML code etc etc.

There's a simple saying in our business: sell what is already selling.

Let's apply this to your SEO-less online marketing.

Rather than spending months or years (time is money) on technically Google-optimising everything about your website/s, devouring every latest SEO trick and building hundreds of quality backlinks, INSTEAD make sure that your fine-tuned marketing messages CONSTANTLY appear on sites that Google ALREADY loves.

When your messages appear on some of these sites, Google will put it on Page 1 in UNDER TWENTY MINUTES.

And you have time to go out and enjoy a movie rather than buying another SEO book, or expand your product range, or get more testimonials etc.

And yes, I think you MUST use a paused Adwords account to find out exact long search phrases in your niche to use as titles and content in your messages.

But that's VERY different to constant SEO development of YOUR website/s.

If you want to find these Google-loved sites where your messages MUST appear, go to Alexa dot com and check the top 100/500. Work out where you can get your messages seen on these sites and indexed rapidly and high on Google.

For example, I get incredible Page 1 Google results from a site that is in the 300s on Alexa - all WITHOUT a penny spent on SEO.

Google ALREADY loves this site and doesn't care much for mine but I don't care. Because my messages are on that sites and others! And I keep them there.

Those sites are among the biggest traffic drivers to my poorly-SEOd site. And they're free to place messages there.

No PPC.

Now imagine if you have great marketing messages appearing on TEN or TWENTY of these Google-loved sites a day.

This will give you far more IMMEDIATE and FREE traffic than wasting years of your life on SEO-ing YOUR site to death.

Read this next part carefully because this is the part that the SEO-worshippers seem to miss in my argument when they launch their counter-attacks:

Of course, you MUST have YOUR landing pages PROPERLY tested and SORTED in terms of RESPONSE and CONVERSION and different landing pages split-tested THOROUGHLY when the traffic DOES come from these OTHER Google-friendly sites BUT you have optimised it for PEOPLE, targeted prospects, NOT a Google algorithm/robot that changes its mind constantly about Quality Score!

The last time I looked, SEO consultants were not recognised advertising copywriters (which could be a more fruitful use of financial resources but question everything).

Consider, for example, that the bestselling digital product sites on ClickBank attract as much as 75% of their traffic from affiliates (via articles, PPC, opt-in-lists etc). The Google optimisation of the original digital product vendor then is far less important than their landing pages' SALES CONVERSION optimisation.

Far from being misanthropic, I actually have nothing but respect for good SEO people because it seems like a technically complex process and Google seem to keep moving the goalposts - my main consideration here is the time/money cost effectiveness of online marketing for small business entrepreneurs like us.

In short, SEM which (if I understand the term properly) is Search Engine Marketing IS the way to go as it's driven by sites and results OUTSIDE your landing page.

So there we are.

Let the vengeful fists of SEO fury come now but hopefully this post will facilitate an open-minded, intelligent debate about cost-effective online marketing tactics and strategy.

In so doing, I hope this helps your small business journey because I know how important succeeding in it is to you.

On an unrelated matter, I came across this cool axiom from Jim Rohn yesterday: "Your personal income rarely exceeds your personal development."

Hard to argue there.

To those ready to open fire back with personal attacks, you may want to check my professional credentials on my website and the kind of people publicly championing my book e.g. David Meerman Scott, the editor of "Real Business" magazine and British multimillionaire, Duncan Bannatyne (from BBC's "Dragons' Den"), before dismissing me as "just another get rich quick" author.

Let's stick to the issues.

Have a great day.

I`ve moved this thread over to our new dedicated Webmaster/SEO section.

I'm intrigued, especially to know how you get your messages onto these sites for free... I've been teaching myself SEO and have been getting reasonably good at it but writing marketing copy and SEM is something that I am not any good at yet.

Interesting thread!

I beleive SEO is valuable to all businesses. It creates more traffic, which turn into sales. I don't think it makes too much of a difference on the size of the company.

Only my two cents though, your thread brings up some very good points.

I have a great results with SEO in my services, but you have to optimize your sites to top 10.

what he said is absolutely true, the method he describes saves you money, time, and one HUGE headache! LOL

and you can get just as good results with his method rather than kill your brain and pocket with SEO

bravo

I totally disagree with the OP.. SEO is very important in both small to big businesses... Without doing seo to my own websites, I should not be earning $800 from adsense every month...

I would have to disagree that SEO is a complete waste of time.

I am not going to argue that these guerrilla marketing tactics that you are discussing wont work, they definitely do and they are a smart way of attracting traffic. But going out and just putting all your eggs in one basket dont make sense, especially when you can utilize these methods and capitalize more.

With these vary same tactics you could make so much more money if you utilize the strengths of SEO. SEO dont take no money spending or anything like that to reach to number 1 in Google. All it takes is the will to do it because there is GREAT SEO advice for free all over the internet, you can get your hands on many books or ebooks with quality information that could help you do your own SEO.

If you take the time to optimize your site and then you go out and do these very same guerrilla marketing techniques in some cases you could not only get traffic from your messages on other Google friendly sites but you could also be building your link campaign and build your Google rank and start getting yourself alot of free traffic from Google.

Thats just my opinion but SEO doesnt have to be hard on your pocket at all and it can be very rewarding. My thing is just optimize and monetize your site, keep adding content and market it as much as possible and you will be fine. With your guerrilla marketing techniques you could really generate alot of funds from your website doing this.

NOT important if you are Microsoft, BBC, Yahoo, CNN, NASA or something like that or maybe Google itself. The traffic will find your way, otherwise who knows you?
if you want to BUILD brand name for your Site, you need to do SEO.

Hi, Terry , very great post, however I still believe SEO has a place for even the very small business owner, depending on their keywords and market. You mention that you go to sites that are ranked very well on Alexa.com and you get on their site for free. What I would like to know is how exactly does one go about getting on these websites for frree?

He mentioned

I imagine he`s talking about sites where feedback can be left, such as blogs, or newspaper articles. Some of these have `dofollow` for any links which are placed on them when the reader leaves feedback by making a comment.

you have to optimize your sites to top 10.

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Hey guys, have u heard about that SEO software called SEnuke? I bumped in it accidentally, I've got the trial version and it helped me a lot. And it was much more time saving than other old methods. )