In the 21st century, we’ve seen a paradigm shift in the marketing sphere. The online marketing opportunities brought to the fore due to the internet are tremendous. Not only that, there have been noticeable changes that are happening in the online marketing space itself. Many opportunities are available to business owners in the form of inbound and outbound marketing. Even for businesses which are just about to be born, there are options to create awareness and entice customers. The aim of this article is to give a brief introduction about how a business with a very limited budget can get great SEO results using a simple step by step process and leveraging the overall results with a mix of paid (advertising), earned (organic ranking ) and owned (email marketing) methods.

The Issue for Small Businesses

In the early years of a business launch, most of the funds are meant for innovation and staff salaries. However, creating a wonderful product is only one side of the story. The other side is making it available to the desired targets. So here is where Digital Marketing comes to the fore. The world of digital marketing is very dynamic and considering the fast pace with which it changes its standard processes and algorithm, it can be very baffling and overwhelming for small businesses. Unlike an established business, small businesses or start-up companies do not have a big marketing budget.

So the major issue is a lack of resources to do exhaustive research and devise a strategy and a lack of funds to implement an online marketing plan.

The Solution

Even though intimidating challenges await small organizations and start-up companies, there remains ample opportunities and untapped sources to create a sound online presence and convert 'cold prospects' to 'hot leads'.

Let’s look at the various aspects of online marketing.

Any business which aims to get a better footprint in the world wide web should have the following:

- A decently designed website with which human users love to engage

- The same website must follow standards so that search engines love it

- Create a strong social media presence

- Allocate a small to moderate budget for Facebook ads and AdWords.

- Run a campaign which builds list – a mix of content marketing and paid ads

If you are interested in ‘A standard step by step process for SEO’ there are plenty of good materials available online and most of them are well conceived.

Now we shall elaborate how SEO is important, and how it can be boosted by the other two components of digital marketing. We shall be assuming we are considering the major search engines like Google and Big which love to rank a website which has better engagement. Engagement could be measured by metrics like click-through rate, time spent on the website, page views, returning visitors vs. new visitors, the depth of interaction, the timing of the day, etc.

It becomes a chicken and egg story when someone is trying to rank the websites, and the requirement is to get better engagement. Until they have a good ranking they won’t get visitors, and until they have a good number of visitors they wouldn’t get better engagement.

Before we go further, I would like to clarify that paid marketing and owned marketing do not directly enhance your search rankings; rather good organic ranking comes as a by-product along with the direct benefits of ads and email marketing. Let’s look at them how they help.

Tip 1. Couple paid ads with your marketing campaign to get better engagement

To get relief from this kind of Catch 22 situation, one needs to create engaging content which falls into owned content marketing and expose that content to meaningful customers via paid channels. Here Facebook advertising plays a great role. Often, posting your content on various social media channels and boosting the post can make more people aware of your business. Even long before the product or service is launched, a curiosity-building campaign can be created using paid marketing which would lead to the broad end of the funnel or the landing page which gives a hint and sensitizes the people about the products, and depending on the magnitude of their interest, they could even show interest to be notified in the future. This forms a classic example of organizing paid and owned marketing with SEO, where people would know about your brand and search it or even bookmark it to come back again to find your website. Often graphic representation of a social post is more engaging than simple text messages or post.

Tip 2. Run event specific campaigns and giveaways to get more likes and reviews

Getting genuine local reviews is often a challenge. However giving away a review copy, or a test product and conditioning the customers to leave a review can be of great value. A workflow can also be created to like and share a product on their Facebook timeline to get an Early Bird offer. These campaigns can be worded, and I leave that to the creative imagination of marketers.

These local reviews and associated social signals give you a good leverage for local SEO.

Tip 3. Use your PPC keywords insights to manage SEO content

There are two ways to go about this. You can use the various PPC research tools to find low cost and high volume keywords and use them in variations to create content. A group of closely related content used in content and Meta description and titles gives a very good result for SEO. The other way is to run paid campaigns and find out which keywords are converting well and then utilizing them in content along with their long tail variations to leverage SEO.

Tip 4. Use email marketing carefully and leverage SEO

If a business successfully generates a group or community of targeted customers and feeds them with meaningful content, it leverages their SEO in a big way. A carefully created copy for email marketing, can be reused as a blog content. Having inbound links and CTA buttons in the email copy helps in better social shares as well as the chances to rank better.

How to use the above strategies on a limited budget:

While all the above things might sound time-consuming, it all boils down to good planning and looking at the big picture. When businesses wish to be profitable, they need a good plan to get maximum attention of their customers without creating noise. They also need to balance their expenditure with available resources. Understanding their customers and finding which channels would be more meaningful helps them prioritize and find the right mix for promotion. None of the channels are enough to be sure that they can support the business in solitude. So here are few more tips:

- All three parameters are required. But depending on the budget available select the best channel and prioritize it.

- Consider the adjunct channels and allocate a proportionate amount of content.

- Create recyclable and reusable content

- See the big picture and find the links between all three channels

- Maximize by optimization and boost by taking professional help

Final Thoughts

Today, it is all about creating value for customers and search engines are not merely a tool to find content, they have grown with more intelligence and in the pursuit of being more and more useful so that they can make available the resources what the users need. In this context, SEO may need considerable planning. But understanding the overlap of SEO and other marketing channels will help in creating assets that are used in multiple instances and for more than one purposes. Every business should plan for SEO in the long term and have milestones which can be modified if any contingency arises. A comprehensive SEO strategy pays out in the short and long term when it is supported by other channels and offline efforts of your organization. Simple processes creating set proper data analysed from open sources can tremendously help in boosting SEO performances. Having said all these things, I also understand the limitations small businesses might face, but learning these small but intricate things will give you a better outcome regarding a cost to benefit comparison. Finally, I wish the readers good luck and invite them to discuss, like, share and comment.