In the past, small businesses in Sacramento and other places had trouble increasing awareness of their products and services because larger corporations could afford better marketing. The high cost of traditional marketing – print media, direct mail, advertisements, radio, television – was a serious barrier to entry for smaller companies. Nowadays, however, small businesses can compete with bigger companies through an effective Sacramento search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. This is because the World Wide Web has made it easier for them to get recognized through search engines that don’t care how large the company is.

So what do search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing look for when suggesting links to a webpage? An article in Business 2 Community gives an explanation:

If you were explaining your business in person to every interested party, they could ask questions and interact with you. Search engines though do not work that way. The search engine has to know where to file you and when to bring up your page without ever speaking to you. It’s a robot that looks only for the information you input so you need to put your best (and clearly explained) foot forward.

Furthermore, the better the search engine optimization for Sacramento businesses is, the higher search engines will rank those websites and the higher the probability of those websites turning up in the average web surfer’s search results. Small businesses can look for companies offering SEO services, especially those that focus on helping businesses improve their online marketing. Such companies, like Champion Online Marketing, employ different strategies to improve the client website’s ranking on search engines.

One such strategy is using social media sites to promote the business online. Many people who have internet access have a social media account as well, and small businesses can use those social media sites to get clients. According to Business 2 Community: “They give you a quick turnaround and can widen your online footprint exponentially. By posting consistently on engaging topics, you can attract attention from a huge platform of online users.”

Small business owners can benefit from hiring companies who understand how search engines work and can implement an effective strategy to attract visitors to their websites; if done right, these visitors could then become customers. As more and more people rely on the Internet to look for a product or service, companies will surely benefit from this investment.

(Article Excerpt and Image from Three Ways Your Small Business Can Use SEO, Business 2 Community, November 28, 2013)