No one (including myself) goes to the second page of search results (occassionaly i do go to the second page), and instead change the search keywords, so you see how important is it for a business to be on the first search results page (that includes Search Engine Marketing – the sponsored links on the top and right side of search results page). If a business is not on the first page (ok granted second page works as well), then your business is not shown up for hundreds of thousands of searches done each month by consumers looking for services/products that you provide. Note that more than 61 billion searches are done each month using the 3 major search engines.

The potential is unlimited if a business can tap into 1% (0.1% will work would be big enough as well) of those searches and show up for the right keywords. If you have the time and a bit of technical background, there are hundreds of articles to show you how to do this, if not you can always get professional help and get your business (and website) the visibility it deserves. I have helped some customers who started doing this on their own, but could never finish it because they needed to focus on their business. The baseline is needless to say SEO is a key piece of marketing that cannot be ignored by a business who is serious about growth.

Where do you start – find the keywords that customers would use to find you. Get feedback from your loyal customers to see if those keywords are relevant. If you are a bit technical, get a book on SEO (SEO Made Simple by Michael Fleischner is a good start) and follow the chapters to optimize your website. Continue doing it for few months and you will see in few months how targeted traffic on your website has gone up, and also realize the ROI on your efforts. Good luck!!

But the real question is – is social media really working for small businesses? I don’t think so. Ok, it is working for few of them, but that number is small. Most of these businesses create a business page on Facebook, and either have their employees, friends or family as fans, but is that really helping them?

One thing that certainly happens is that these businesses have some presence on one or the other social networking sites, but without the presence of a marketing strategy, tools to measure the key performance indicators, the real power and potential of viral marketing is not harnessed. These businesses do not see any gains for such activities and the entire effort fizzles out.

Social Media is a two way lane, where business needs to be in conversation with customers, not just pitching their products, but helping customers (And that’s why I call it Conversion thru Conversation), listening to them and evolving based on the feedback from customers. This was never possible through conventional marketing.

SMM is catching up like wild fire and has huge potential only if taken and executed seriously. Some points to keep in mind : Define a marketing strategy – networking sites that you would want to use, fit this strategy into your overall marketing goals, do your research on tools to measure the ROI and then go forward with the implementation. And you will see how you convert customers through conversation.