Working with small business owners every day, I’m often told by people they want to do all their own online marketing in order to save money.

While that may seem logical, outsourcing SEO, PPC, copywriting etc can actually save you a lot of money. Read on to find out more…

• Experience counts for a lot

There’s no substitute for someone who’s experienced in online marketing and can guide you through the scams, pitfalls and misinformation that is still around.

Outsourcing everything to one company can let you tap into decades of internet marketing experience, which as a small business or start-up company could be critical.

While some people I’ve worked with have got to grips with online marketing after years of perseverance and a lot of wasted money, they could have achieved the same or better goals in a much shorter timeframe.

• Mistakes can be costly

I often speak to small business owners after they’ve spent a small fortune and failed to achieve the results they wanted.

One of the biggest oversights is not measuring the return from the various online marketing channels. With things such as pay per click advertising, Google Adwords supplies plenty of information to help you see how much you’re spending. And of course, you can set your own budget in order to keep on top of your spend.

When it comes to SEO, the main error I see is people trying to target the wrong keywords. For example, if you’re a traditional shoe shop in Edinburgh for example, you might mistakenly decide to target “shoe shops” as your main keyword.

This particular tactic could result in ploughing a lot of money (in relative terms) into SEO, only to be barely registering a drop in the ocean. Large shoe shop chains for example will probably have an SEO budget of thousands per month.

In this scenario, it would be better to focus your SEO efforts and budget on “shoe shops Edinburgh”, which is a much more relevant term and easier to achieve page 1 Google rankings for.

Summary

If you feel like you need help or advice with your online marketing, don’t be afraid to ask for it at the beginning.

A financial outlay may be the last thing you want, but taking a longer term business view, it could save you a small fortune and accelerate your success.

If you liked this article you may also want to read: 10 questions to ask when hiring an SEO agency

Image Credit: Avolore

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2012 at 8:00 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.