What will get my small business good SEO rankings?

[Matt]

In other words, what can get my local small business to appear on page 1 of google when customers search "Contractors in Algonquin IL" or similar?

I was thinking to put $1-200 a month on googles ad program. Will that help a lot?

[Beatrix]

I think you should try some seo professional instead of using PPC. In my view all small business owners include using strategic keywords, high-quality product descriptions, and unique new content on your website. If you have to success in your small business then you have to involved in Social media marketing and Increase social media activity Google+, Facebook and Twitter pages updated and active.

[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.

[Doodled]

You can burn through that sort of budget in no time using PPC.

Instead consider who is ranking top for that phrase - it's yellowpages.com, manta.com, google+ local, etc. In other words, directories. So what you need to do is get yourself into those directories and optimise your entry there.

What does optimise mean?
- full text description about your company
- as many pictures as you are allowed
- full details (opening times, payments accepted, etc, etc)

Then ask past customers to post reviews about you on those sites.

You can't beat them, so join them! Invest a little time in your listings and save a whole lot on PPC

[Ryan]

Matt, as a local business you should be focusing your efforts on local search and the local listings you see when you do a search. The local listing are the ones that show up with a little icon and have A, B, C etc. on them. This is a little bit different kind of campaign, but is still SEO. It will also help you tremendously in terms of people searching for you on mobile devices. Plus you can put a marketing element to it as well where you can run deals (some for free) when you focus your efforts locally.

In terms of blasting a bunch of money with PPC campaigns you should consider what kind of an offer you want to put out there and use a landing page to capture the users info. Keep in mind, the better the offer, the better the results. Also, make sure you are not just sending them to your main website. This could end up costing you a bunch of money with little or no results at all.