Growing Your Oregon Business With SEO

Search Engine Optimization To Increase Revenue

The world of business is ever changing. If you are still trying to promote your business through old tactics such as radio, newspapers, or even TV ads, you may be losing out on a lot of customers and a lot of money for old-school techniques.

Let me ask you this, when you want to find something today, what is the first thing you do? 95% of people I ask this to say the exact same thing, they Google it, or search online on their phone. So what does this mean? This means if you are not online, you are losing out.

What Do You Need To Get Started

To start off, I am guessing that most of you have a website. If not, get one. It is so inexpensive to buy a domain to get started. ($10 on GoDaddy). After this, you will need hosting that will run you about $5.00 a month or more depending on what size you choose and what host. I would recommend HostGator and just a basic shared hosting plan until you are driving more than 10,000 visitors a month. Then you will need a bigger plan. So these costs add up to about $65.00 a year.

Now you need to build a website. Please do not use something like Weebly or Wix or any of these specialty prebuilt site programs. They do not search as well in Google. They also don’t pass as much power to your site. They work and look pretty yes, but to be respected as a real company, you are going to want to stick to WordPress. This is also the most diverse way to build a site and easy to find help as most everyone knows WordPress. It is also the best format for Google to read and tends to rank the best online. You can start with a basic site that you can get anyone to build out for you for a few hundred dollars and then upgrade later when you have more capitol.

Your Next Step

Now that you have your site ready, you will need to optimize your SEO. To do this you can start reading articles on sites like search engine journal or even Moz, but I would personally recommend hiring a professional Portland SEO consultant to do the job. They will cost you money yes, but messing up your optimization can get you in real big trouble. Also, you will be found faster online and within 8-10 months, you will be getting new clients without any extra effort. Once the SEO’s job is done, you will keep your rankings for the most part and the clients will continue in on a constant flow. The hardest part is paying for it before you get results. It can be slow and painful, but pay off 100 fold in the end if not more. I would be sure to prepare to pay $12k-$18k depending on the difficulty of your niche for getting your SEO done for you. If you feel that is too much and you go with a cheap SEO, you will get cheap results and maybe hurt your site forever leaving you to have to start all over with a whole new site. I have seen this many times from people who were pinching pennies and in the end it cost them twice as much VS just paying a professional to do the job. The old saying pays true, you get what you pay for. 

In doing the mentioned steps, you will have your business off to a great start. Not having an online presence will cost you countless dollars in the end. A business without a website is suicide now and in the future. You may be able to make it work, but you might be missing out on 2-10x your revenue if not more. Have enough vision to see that online is where the future is still heading and make your mark.