When you start out with website SEO, you may think that “you get what you pay for” has to automatically mean “expensive equals good.”  But this is not the case in the slightest.  In fact, affordable SEO is how the game is played, in this day and age.  If you are paying a heavy premium for your small business SEO, you may actually be paying too much for a bunch of frills you may not even need.

A lot of times, dealing with a big company does not turn into making big gains.  When you hire a huge law firm to represent you in court, they send two trainees, one experienced lawyer, and charge you for all three at the highest rate of the group (whether or not they actually do anything).  And often enough, Atticus Finch could defend you just as well.  And when it comes to optimizing your web site for the search engines, this is very much the case, as well.

Consider that getting first page placement is tricky, which is most likely why you decided to outsource this task in the first place.  After all, if we were all SEO pros, the first page simply would not be big enough to hold ALL of our sites.  A good professional search engine optimizer is going to take you, step by step, through the organic SEO process, which will end up with your web site not only delivering good content to those who stumble on it.  In the end, the RIGHT customers are going to do more than just stumble onto your site.

When it comes down to it, the first stage of any SEO operation revolves around knowing who you want to attract – since no site is perfect for everybody, you have to have your niche firmly in mind, and give the people what they want.  And the second stage of the SEO process is just looking through your site, and noticing the little “tweaks” you can make, to make the whole process of being noticed by the search engines run with a smoother stride.  And once those two parts are done, all that remains is in the doing.

Does it really take a huge company with oak paneled offices and fancy letterhead to make your web site shine?  Of course not.  So don’t pay more than you should!