Many small to medium size firms will obviously want to cut down their marketing spend, by replacing older more traditional ways to advertise with SEO instead. A sole trader or smaller sized business may try to give the basics of search engine optimisation a try, especially as some of the more fun parts are not rocket science.

There are thousands of websites which offer information and free advice and tips on how to SEO, many are in the form of articles like we have on our website. Others are in free business guides that you may receive from grant driven organisations like Business Link.

Whilst we would certainly recommend this if you have no money spare to invest in an SEO campaign, this approach is simply not suitable for even a slightly challenging market. The reason we say this has nothing to do with self promotion on our side, it’s because it will become a real, genuine time wasting exercise. We know as a small to medium size business ourselves, that time is money and we would not attempt to succeed in an arena which was something new to us.

To break down the reasons why it is not advisable, here are some basic guidelines for when to attempt SEO for yourself…

If you have a business that is recognised by name and is well known, and all you need is a contact page that will easily reach the top of Google. This would work for a company like ‘Geoff Pearce Tiles’, as the competition would be very low.

Start to look into how to SEO if your target key phrases are maybe just 2 or 3, or better still just one. This reduces the time and effort you have to put into a project.

Don’t consider trying to get to the top of the results for a phrase that attracts more than three or four thousand searches per month on Google. Usually this means the competition will be strong and you need some very good SEO to guarantee some decent results.

If you are in a very specialist industry or niche market, and access to this sector is very difficult, then it may be easier to learn how to SEO for your own site. This is mainly because not so many others will be chasing the same positions in the search engine rankings.

Tags: Google, Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Optimization