How Can Small Businesses Find Cost-Effective SEO Services?

1st Click Consulting Can Benefit Small Businesses–Even When They Are 1000’s of Miles Away!

It started with a question from a 1st Click Works reader in San Antonio, a professor at UTSA, who asked how I work with companies at a distance. That question made me think about what it is that 1st Click Consulting actually does for its clients. And, what makes 1st Click Consulting unique among SEO and Internet marketing professionals.

To answer the reader’s question, it is actually very easy for me to work at a distance with clients. In fact, I am currently working with clients on both coasts, and I have clients here in the Denver area that I have never met face-to-face. There are two reasons for this:
1. Technology now makes it easy to meet with clients in an online environment. Go to Meeting, Skype, and cell phones make it easy and inexpensive to collaborate this way.
2. Once I have buy-in from the client on an offer (or offers) and we have talked through their primary competitive differentiator that will be used throughout the website, I can usually work from there on my own.

That’s because a successful website answers the questions that a site visitor would have—not what the company thinks is important. And, 1st Click Consulting knows what visitors are looking for on the basis of research.

The work that 1st Click Consulting does is customized to the individual company based upon two types of research. First, we employ a keyword database we subscribe to. We use this database to determine the relevant search phrases that offer the most opportunity for good rankings. Then, we look at the companies that the new website would compete with for search engine rankings and what they are doing to market themselves online. Based on that information, we create an online marketing strategy for the client. I think our clients would agree that when they follow our advice, their sales opportunities increase and they get better quality leads, as well, from their website and other online marketing efforts.

1st Click Consulting occupies a unique niche among Internet marketing companies, and that is partly why we have been so successful with clients. Usually, SEO is expensive. Here in Denver, several firms that specialize in SEO require a one-year contract and charge a monthly fee ranging from $3500 – $7800 per month. For that, they will make some small modifications to your website’s pages, but mostly they are working to build credibility for the website through links from other sites, including social media sites. Much of the actual work is contracted to shops in India and other off-shore countries. And, none of this is customized to the needs of the individual client. Nor does it take into account the strategies most likely to be successful—or successful long-term, as the search engines become more sophisticated about evaluating websites’ quality.

That kind of investment is far outside of the budget of most small businesses. So, instead of hiring an SEO specialist, they hire a web development company that claims to know something about SEO. Unfortunately, most of them don’t know more than what the letters “SEO” stand for. So, these websites are not optimized.

Remember, the Internet is a more competitive environment than other marketing channels. Unlike the local newspaper or TV station, that will sell ads to every plumber in town, there are only 10 spots on Google’s first page of results for any search phrase.

If your competitors are small businesses, assistance from 1st Click Consulting will put you far ahead of the pack. Even when the competition includes much larger, multinational corporations, 1st Click Consulting has been able to achieve top 5 rankings on Google for top-level keywords like “soda ash” and “metal injection molding.”

1st Click Consulting believes in focusing on the website as a first priority. We create content for websites from the ground up, reverse-engineering the navigation and the page content to address the things that searchers are looking for. That ensures that the search engines will truly see our clients’ websites as relevant to popular keyword phrases. For companies in categories that are not terribly competitive, optimizing the website content alone radically improves the effectiveness of the website, bringing these clients more traffic, better leads, and more sales.

When the new website has been launched, the ongoing marketing strategy may include pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing, email, and strategic link-building from relevant websites within the company’s industry or other allied company sites. For local businesses, we offer a localized marketing package that builds links and citations to help these businesses be found for web searches within their local community.

What does all of this cost? Because everything we do is customized to the particular client’s business, we offer menu pricing. On-page optimization, the navigation and content for the website itself, ranges, on average, from $1000 – $2000, depending upon the size of the website. There is package pricing for setting up pay-per-click ad campaigns, for an email strategy and template, and for assistance with link-building, social media, and localized marketing efforts. These are all one-time fees.

1st Click Consulting currently charges only $100 per month for on-going consulting—a real bargain. This allows us to monitor search engine rankings and all the client’s online activities and provide reports on what is working—and sometimes what isn’t. This also allows us to continue to truly partner with clients and make sure that their website continues to perform well for them through changes in search engine algorithms and the always-changing Internet landscape. We provide ongoing consultation about how your business decisions may affect your online results and about new opportunities as they arise.

The cost to get started is just a few minutes of your time to make a phone call to 720-341-6336 or 210-392-5649 (San Antonio callers).

Think you can’t afford professional Internet marketing assistance for your business? The truth is, most of your competitors don’t think they can afford it, either. And, that’s why small- and medium-sized companies can succeed with help from 1st Click Consulting.