Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

The target market is anyone who wants to bring organic traffic to their website and does not have time to do it themselves.

The thing is that virtually every company that wants to improve their natural search ranking might benefit from an SEO consultant.

That is a large range of companies. I would say there is probably a bottom end in terms of revenue and a company would have to have enough revenue to afford the services of an SEO consultant.

Where exactly the line is a very difficult question, and I think you would have a hard time answering it.

Frankly, you may have to hire a market research company to find out what you want to know. i am not sure that is in your budget but that might be a good next step for you.

I would suggest contacting the following organizations who should have the statistics you're looking for:

https://www.sempo.org
https://www.sma-uk.org/

Any company that has online sales would find value in investing a SEO/SEM service. Consultant services that use their website as a brochure would also find great value in your service.

People making those decisions would most likely be directors of marketing or sales departments.

Consultant services
City/municipalities
Membership driven organizations
Small/regional retail chains
Special event sites (large concerts/festivals, charity, etc)
Local auto dealerships
New start-ups

Trying to earn local business would be a good place to start. I would conisder joining a networking group just to get your name out there at a grassroots level.

You can use SalesGenie.com for leads. The nice part about this site is the ability to somewhat qualify the leads. You can search by geography, business size, number of employees, annual revenue, newly formed LLC/DBA's etc.

Hopefully some of this will be of help to you...

Cheers!

Jonathon Casalou
Business Development & Marketing

This is a difficult question for an SEO to answer. You're asking for answers which take a long time to come by and anyone who perceives you as a competitor will feed you disinformation or will be reluctant to respond.

Since I detest misinformation I will respond to your question but I suspect it won't be the magic bullet.

If your question was "what entities should SEO their site that would be an easy question: all of them.

The obstacle is that most organizations do not

1. envision their web sites as prospecting tools and
2. therefore are not able or do not see value in SEO.

Clearly both assumptions are incorrect (even if I do say so myself ;-) but these entities are typically difficult to sell to. They need to be convinced that the service has merit.

Any business which sells online understands (or should) the need for SEO. The issue for this group is contacting them at the opportune moment in time and helping them to understand the strengths of your offering.

Ultimately it boils down to your organization. It is not uncommon for SEOs to develop strengths and knowledge in a specific niche.

So, the answer may be a question: what organizations do you feel you can help the most?

Regards,

Greg Hill
Trinity Search Engine Marketing

I do not have hard data for you, but this is what I think based on my own experience:

1. Companies that are about to, or are in the middle of, redesigning their website (or launching their first one). Might even expand that to companies that have recently launched a website.

2. I would guess that companies who have hired an outside firm to design their website are more likely to be willing to outsource SEO as well.

3. Contacts - whomever manages the website launch and/or maintenance. Usually a marketing manager, director or VP. (Not the IT person because they are not responsible for amount of traffic).

4. The larger the company's prospect base, the more likely they are to need SEO. For example, my company sells to a very finite market -- telecom operators -- so we wouldn't need SEO as much as those who need to find their prospects. B2C tends to have a LOT more prospects than most B2B.

5. Companies that do lead generation. Similar to above - if you don't do lead gen, you may not need SEO as much.

Hope that helps.

TrinitySEO has a good point - many companies should be doing SEO/SEM, but don't. These are definite prospects for you. If you had the time, you could look up companies, think of what term they would benefit from using, and then see how well they rank on that term. Those that rank poorly are prime candidates for you.

One variable you may want to consider is company size. Larger companies may have in house staff doing their SEO/SEM, so wouldn't likely need to hire an outside firm.

The other extreme is those companies that are not online at all. They likely would benefit from setting up a website to begin with, but until that happens, they wouldn't need SEO/SEM.

I was thinking that perhaps this would be target market based (such as whether the company was a B2B or B2C company, or an online versus brick and mortar). I was thinking that the more online (such as online store, versus bricks and mortar) would need it more, but then again anyone who has a business web site really could benefit from optimizing their site for search engines.