The New York Times has been running a series about female entrepreneurs/small business owners called She Owns It, and the latest installment includes some of the most honest quotes I’ve ever seen about how SMB owners think and feel about SEO.
Today’s article talks about a few business owners that recently redesigned their websites.
Beth Shaw, owner of YogaFit, has just hired a company to do SEO, the article says.
The first phase of the project will involve cleaning up the code on each of YogaFit’s Web pages for a charge of about $2,500. After that, ongoing S.E.O. will cost $1,500 a month. Ms. Shaw found this price reasonable after talking to another firm that wanted to charge between $2,500 and $5,000 a month. When she asked the firm how long it would take to see results, she said she was told she might not see any.
“It’s not a guaranteed science,” she acknowledged. Still, the answer made her leery. She said the firm she hired sounded “a little bit more optimistic,” and told her that, within three months, she should see more traffic and click-throughs on her site.
The article also talks about Deirdre Lord, owner of The Megawatt Hour.
…she’s skeptical of S.E.O. firms and admitted she’s done “zilch” so far to optimize her site. “I feel like you should be able to see major impacts in the first couple of months,” she said, “but these firms, I don’t even know what these firms do.”
Also appearing in the article is Alexandra Mayzler, owner of Thinking Caps Group, who’s not planning to do any SEO on her new site.
“I don’t think so,” she replied. She explained that the site really serves as a resource for existing clients. “People don’t generally search for us all that much,” she added.
(Note: Given the chance, I would encourage Alexandra to reconsider that decision. Her company offers coaching and tutoring and those are both services that are fairly highly-searched-for in my experience. I’d also have encouraged her not to change the company name from Thinking Caps Tutoring to Thinking Caps Group because having the “tutoring” keyword in the business name would be a benefit in Google Maps/Plus optimization.)
No matter my advice there … I think this is an interesting article that reflects a lot of the reality when small businesses are faced with tackling SEO.
Give it a read and let me know your reaction in the comments below. Thanks!
(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)
This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.
New York Times Article Shows the Reality of Small Businesses & SEO
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