It is quite likely that you will have received email flyers and telesales calls from various SEO experts offering to get your website listed on page 1 of Google. These companies present an impression that SEO is some sort of back office technical function - a dark art even! - that will transform your website and your business with some clever technical jiggery pokery.

But what they conveniently forget to mention is that the fundamental building block of genuine SEO is good old fashioned marketing intelligence and research information. Using this as a sold basis you can quickly get to the bottom of how SEO can work for your business.

For example:

• How many businesses actually know how their potential customers are searching for them on the internet?
• And if there are hundreds, or indeed thousands, of other businesses all targeting the same general market place, how can any one business define the parameters that will make them stand out and be found by the clients they want?

Alternatively, you might be offered SEO as part of a package to design and build a website. But how does this fit in with the business objectives in the future, long after the website has been built?

Getting to the heart of the business

Great SEO is much more than a complex technical process, or a process performed at a single specific point of time. Genuine SEO gets to the very heart of your business and straddles all the following areas:

• Market research – Identifying how potential clients are searching for your services – ie. what actual words and phrases are they using in reality
• Website design – Creating the right messages that connect with your potential clients - in other words when they arrive on your site, keep them there!
• Optimisation of web pages – Generating the desired response within the search engines
• Sales – Generating the desired response from visitors to your website – ie. triggering buying behaviour
• Monitor and review – Using the detailed feedback that is instantly available to fine tune the business
• Ongoing developments – Identifying new opportunities as the pattern of searching changes and the search engines requirements are modified

Cost versus benefit ...

If genuine SEO straddles all of these areas, does that mean it will cost a fortune and be beyond the reach of most businesses? Actually no. In fact the reverse is true!

SEO is expensive if you’re spending hard-earned money targeting the wrong market, or a market that will never respond because your message isn’t clear, or a market so large you will hardly ever be found.

SEO becomes affordable as soon as you understand how it relates to the different functions of your business. Starting with market research, you can then identify what might be critical to the success of your business and the potential return on investment of any money spent.

An example of where this message has worked is on the Enfield Doors website www.enfielddoors.co.uk. Enfield is a manufacturer of specialist-sized timber doors for the building and construction industry, including fire doors. Prior to October 2008 they had never received any business from the internet and their website. Our team optimised their site after testing keywords and phrases that we discovered the construction industry uses to find fire doors and specialist doors.

During the 12 months from November 2008 and October 2009 new business from the internet averaged £52,000 per month and we have now commenced a further programme for 2010 to increase this into new markets and with additional keywords.