Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) constantly struggle to optimize their online marketing and SEO campaigns to deliver “more bang for your buck”.  Huge corporations may talk about branding or engagement with the consumer, and while these marketing principles are important, the SME generally just want to create brand awareness.  With marketing dollars stretched and limited resources, how can a SME be saavy with their online marketing?   On the other side, it is estimated that almost 80 percent of global economic growth is dependent on SMEs.  Therefore, it is very important that SMEs implement their online strategies intelligently.  Just making a few company websites that are comprised of nothing more than marketing collateral will not be effective. The idea is to plan out a predetermined online marketing strategy specifically to boost online business.

There are many methods that can essentially bring in a change of traffic flow on the internet.  It is quite embarrassing to find companies relying only on instant return campaigns like PPC (pay per clicks). There are ‘natural optimization methods’ too that are a little time consuming but if configured correctly, they can bring long term returns and attract quality traffic to a site.  There are four key ingredients for achieving success in the natural optimization method which include the following:

1) A good keywords list,
2) quality content,
3) establishing external links and
4) sitemap submissions.  

Keywords should be accurately added as too many may lead to a bounce of the website. The written content should cover the key selling points. The external links are channels to attract traffic and should be judiciously inserted so that web crawlers can easily pick them up. Sitemaps are lists of a website’s internal pages and links, and so their presence ensures search engine’s complete knowledge about a site.

Other than these fundamentals, SMEs can also depend on social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for online promotions of their business. Customers can learn more about your business and simultaneously endorse a service that they like.  These sites act as an important link to the SME websites to provide an instant public relation & brand promotion opportunity in real-time.  Website tracking systems like ‘Google analytics’ and other Google webmaster tools can help you measure how effective your online marketing strategy is panning out.