With tighter marketing budgets more and more small businesses are discovering they can save money and actually get better results by moving their budget into online marketing.

Specifically search engine marketing. Whether it be by getting your site ranked organically or by way of a pay-per-click campaign. Study after study have shown search engine marketing to be the most effective form of advertising in terms of ROI compared to traditional marketing tactics.

Not only is it better than traditional marketing but it beats other online marketing tactics as well as seen in this recent Forbes study (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007131)

Think about it, it makes perfect sense. In a culture bombarded by information and advertising today's consumer is practically immune to traditional "shot-gun blast" advertising. Why waste valuable mind space actually paying attention to tv commercials, radio ads, billboards, junk mail, etc when you can simply get on Google and go find what you want when you are ready to buy it? Need to prop open a door? That's what the Yellow Pages are for :)

I tend to think Madison Avenue would have us think otherwise but the proof is in the pudding. What a small business needs most is a qualified lead. Let's suppose you are an attorney in Austin. Who needs an attorney in Austin? Somebody in Austin who happens to need an attorney of course! How do you find those people? Just one second while I check something here...

Ok, I'm back. I just checked Google's keyword tool and low and behold there were roughly 75 thousand searches for the keyword "austin attorney" last month! Phew! that's a healthy market and if you were an Austin based attorney the best money you could spend getting clients would be on an organic search engine marketing campaign or a pay-per-click campaign optimized to achieve first page ranking for the keyword "austin attorney".

The magic is in the fact that the prospect is searching for you when they need you, that is half the sale right there. A month ago they may have tossed your direct mail piece in the trash but now they are searching for you. All you need to do is be found when they search and have some compelling reasons as to why they should contact you.

If this sounds interesting then you need to get in touch with a professional seo consultant - somebody like me and hey I'm a local and keeping it weird is always good :)

Cheers,

Charles Preston