What will get my small business good SEO rankings?

[Ronnie]

If you want quick result, you can go for PPC. But I'd suggest you to go for organic SEO instead because the keyword 'Contractors in Algonquin IL' has low competition and if the SEO works are done well, within 3-4 months time, your website will come in top ranking. Since the keyword is geo-targeted one, you can tell the SEO guys to do local SEO only.

I've noticed that small businesses are often willing to go for Google's paid ad campaigns. They should realize that success of such campaigns depends entirely on the advertising budget. In your case, if the monthly budget is somewhere around $200, your adverts won't get much visibility. You might think of increasing the campaign amount, but before doing so, you need to make sure that you can get twice the money you are spending, by selling your products/services to customers. But that is more or less unlikely because you run a small business and such businesses don't sell costly packages. This is why, Google's paid ad program is not suitable for the interest of small businesses; the program is mainly for large businesses.

SEO for businesses is becoming local. These days, most businesses are offered local SEO services. Observing this trend in the market, I have been thinking of opening an offshore SEO consultancy firm to help out small and medium size companies based in US and Canada because The domestic companies charge them a very high amount of money. I could offer them quality service at a fairly affordable amount of money.