- Original Poster
- #1
Small Business Online Marketing WITHOUT SEO? Absolutely.
EDITED FOR CLARIFICATION:
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.
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.
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.
You may also want to check my professional credentials on my website and the kind of people publicly championing my book e.g. Duncan Bannatyne, before dismissing me as a "get rich quick" author.
Let's stick to the issues.
Have a great day.
EDITED FOR CLARIFICATION:
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.
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.
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.
You may also want to check my professional credentials on my website and the kind of people publicly championing my book e.g. Duncan Bannatyne, before dismissing me as a "get rich quick" author.
Let's stick to the issues.
Have a great day.
Last edited:
