Jim Goetz—the notorious resident venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital—recently came out and asserted that enterprise software is potentially a $500 billion market. There has been a deluge of business software developments such as cloud infrastructure, CRM (customer relationship management), CMS (content management system), data crunching programs, etc., but these developments more often than not, at least for small to midsize business owners, simply stifle the widely embraced goal of commerce: profit.
While small to midsize business owners are reinvesting in their operations infrastructure with the cloud or trying to connect with consumers in a more streamlined manner via CRM, the most tried and tested method of organic business growth—search engine optimization—often gets left by the wayside in favor of relatively experimental methodologies
This is an odd situation for a number of reasons. One, it’s extremely difficult to track ROI on something as oblique as the cloud. With SEO and web marketing, on the other hand, ROI is fairly ostensible as inbound calls and revenue streams increase. Two, without data crunchers and graduate school statisticians on payroll, making sense of all the data from CRM, CMS, and the cloud is a relative impossibility.
As mentioned above, the results of excellent SEO will be obvious to small to midsize business owners within a month or two but at maximum within six months. If your SEO campaign isn’t resulting in increased consumer interest and subsequent increases in revenue then it’s imperative that you reconsider your SEO consultant.
The beauty of trying to organically grow your company with a SEO consultant, unlike CRM or CMS, is that from an ideological perspective most do not believe in long term contracts. The belief is simple: if SEO campaign managers, web designers, and copywriters are doing their jobs to the standard that’s expected of them, there is simply no reason for contracts that are longer than one month at a time.
Like most business decisions, choosing an SEO company to invest your time and money in has a number of game-changing ramifications. First, if you find your SEO consultant isn’t forthright or shady then it’s probably best that you part ways. Popular search engines like Google and Yahoo don’t take kindly to ‘black-hat’ SEO strategies and if they happen to spot such shady methods—even if you’re unaware of any SEO foul play—the likes of Google and Yahoo will punish your business’s website as opposed to the actual perpetrator. Though you’ve invested your valued money and time in a particular SEO company, cut loose and consider it a sunken cost because it’s certainly better than becoming a ghost on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
The point is that it’s quite easy for good old reliable SEO to get lost in favor of more avant garde, still evolving business growth methods. Of course one shouldn’t be ignorant of the cloud or the importance of data analysis, but in this economy—with its stagnated and undeniably indecisive milieu—a strong and visible ROI is something that should be guaranteed.
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