2.6. Really Small Organization

Take everything we said about small organizations, reduce the head count to one or two people, and pile on several additional demands for your time. Sound like you? We've had the pleasure of working with a lot of really small businesses, and we know how ludicrously tight the shoestrings get. But we also know how satisfying it can be to see a homegrown marketing effort turn into a big upswing in business.

Advantage: Slow Periods Everybody has slow times, but for really small businesses, when you're between projects or in the slow season, things can seem to grind to a complete halt. SEO gives you a way to fill the downtime, while giving structure to the things you should be doing anyway: snooping on your competitors, fine-tuning your goals, and ultimately working on growing your company.

Disadvantage: Not Slow Periods You're negotiating your own contracts. You're dusting your own office. You're filing your own taxes. In addition, you've got that not-so-small task of keeping your customers satisfied. How do you feel about hunkering down and learning all about search engines, basic HTML, and SEO industry trends? That desperate feeling in the pit of your stomach is exactly why there are so many low-low-priced SEO firms out there vying for your money. Problem is, in SEO you often get what you pay for, so you might as well try to do it yourself. You might want to work less formally: Read through this book to get the big picture. Don't fill out the worksheets. Abandon the hour-a-day concept. Tackle the parts that you can, when you can. Whatever you accomplish, pat yourself on the back—your job is hard enough.

Advantage: Your Own Name In many cases, the name of the company is the same as the person behind the company. In other cases, your company may have its own name, but, being so small, your name and your company name are used interchangeably. Building up your personal reputation will benefit your business reputation as well, and luckily, the Web has some exciting nooks and crannies that you can fit into that larger companies can't. Professional networking sites such as LinkedIn offer great opportunities to create a personal profile, and these can often translate to a lovely, professional search engine listing for your own name. Want your target audience to view you as the expert on corporate training or historical aviation models? Just be your witty, knowledgeable self in the right forums and blogs, and your name—and expertise—will be in front of the right people. If you have a lot of insight to share and you have a way with words, you can try to make a name for yourself with a professionally oriented, personally managed blog. (Just be sure to read the "Blogger" section in this chapter, too.)

Little Flower Candy Co.: Know When to Hold "Em! Christine Moore is a former pastry chef who knows a great deal about making delectable handmade desserts using high-quality ingredients. Now she's in business for herself. Working in her own kitchen, using her own hands, she has developed a formidable reputation for making some of the tastiest candies in Los Angeles. But she admits she knows almost nothing about marketing. And she's never had to. Thanks to great connections in L.A.'s visible foodie scene, word of mouth, and some very complimentary press coverage, her business is doing extremely well. When we spoke with her, she was looking toward the upcoming holiday season with excitement—and a good deal of trepidation. Acknowledging that the appeal of her product relies on the small-batch, handmade approach, she says, "I could ruin my reputation in one fell swoop by being greedy." We have no doubt that an SEO campaign could bring Christine lots of new customers. But if things heat up too quickly, she may have more work than she can handle. At her current pace, she has time to get on the phone and call a web customer to work out an ordering glitch and to be there for her family. Of course, she's open to SEO for her site, but, as Christine says, "It's hard to know whether to put the cart before the horse or the horse before the cart." Like any marketing strategy, SEO requires that careful consideration be given to the balance between a business's long-term goals and current capabilities. Christine is in control of her company, and she is in a position to have control over its web presence. She has a good kind of problem. Her "real-world" buzz will be easy to translate into a web buzz, when the time is right! Her site was built in a hurry, under pressure to get a store online in time for an article about her company that was about to go to press. The publication made it clear: no online store, no article. A friend quickly built her site, and Christine wrote the text just hours before it went live. Since the site was built for a ready-made audience of readers who had the URL in print, almost no thought was given to the search engines. As SEO experts, here's what we noticed about her site: There were only two links pointing to it, and neither of them came from the large publications that have printed articles about her company. With such a rabid following and word-of-mouth marketing happening in the real world, she could easily get more links. Also, her site features the word "handmade" because she's not fond of the term "gourmet. "But what are her potential customers searching for? A little research would go a long way in determining if she's losing out on traffic by using the wrong terminology.