Even now, in 2011, most small business owners do not see nor understand the power of Google.

For some strange reason they still have not been able to piece together these two simple vital truths:

1. 80% of the people with access to the Internet go to Google to look up everything they need
2. when people look up something they will most likely buy from the first website or business they see that they think will be able to fill their needs

It is that simple.  I cannot put it in any plainer English than that.  Nobody is going to the phone books any longer.  Coupon books are a think of the past.  Newspapers have been long dead.  Craigslist killed them.

Unless you have an advertising budget that will allow you to produce and regularly air radio & television commercials then you must put your resources towards developing an online presences within Google.

Forget about Yahoo, Bing, Ask or the other small fish out there.  They mean nothing.

Unless your website is on page one for your main keyword or keyword phrase then you will die out unless you have developed a strong word of mouth reputation that generates you new customers on a weekly basis.

Why Don’t Most Small Business Owners Get It?

Its clear to me because I am in the business.  Internet marketing, SEO, Google Places and search engine rankings are concepts that are very clear to me because I work with them on a daily basis.  I understand them because it is my job to do so.

It is not so easy for a framer, plumber, electrician, home builder or HVAC technician to do the same.  They have a hard time making the correlation between the Internet, which in their minds is more for entertainment than anything else, and their phones ringers with qualified customers.

They see search engine optimization and “page one” promises as some type of scam or “hocus pocus.”

Many 3rd party Google Adword resellers have not helped.  They spent the early part of the 2000s making wild claims and ripping my trusting small business owners off by selling them AdWords that would get little to no value at 20 times their actual worth.

So I can fully understand why many people are skeptical when some person tells them that getting to page one of Google will be their holy grail.

The Internet definitely has not established itself a reputation as the most honest and straightforward environment.

You Got Burned By 3rd Party AdWord Resellers Or Shady SEO Companies But It Is Time To Move On!

Do not live in the past.  Learn from your mistakes.  Ask for references.  Make sure a company is legit and can deliver on its promises.  AdWords work but you can buy them straight from Google and not resellers.

Please do not let some swindlers from the past stop you from carving out your own virtual real estate within Google.

A small business, in any industry, could surpass his competition that is much larger than him or her if a little bit of time and money were put towards building an online presence.

By surpassing your main competition in the most dominate search engine in the world you could snap up most, if not all, of the potential customers out there!

While other competition businesses of yours are spending thousands a month on ancient forms of advertising you could be getting several calls a day from people who found you via Google.

Its simple amazing the way the “Big G” has evened the playing fields for smaller companies and they are not even taking advantage of this wonderful opportunity.

Any Business Could Get Themselves To The Top Of Google If He Or She Had Several Extra Hours To Spend A Week

If you want to invest the time to learn a little SEO then you can rank your own business yourself.  Most people are intelligent enough to learn the basics and get started within several days.

Assuming you already have a pre-existing website you can manually

1. submit your website to local and niche directories
2. write an article on a major article directory like Ezine with a link back to your website
3. create a blog on blogspot or WordPress and link back to your main website

These are three things to get you started.  They do not require any advanced training whatsoever.  It will, however, take time to set these properties up.  That is why I said make sure you have a couple extra hours to not only learn the process but implement it.

The amount of work you will have to do will largely depend on your keyword competition.  If you live in a small city and you are a baker then it will not be too difficult to get to page for for “baker [insert your city].”  But if you live in a large city with over a million people and your term is very coveted then you can expect to have to work at it for months.

What is the benefit of paying a professional SEO company to do your search engine optimization for you rather then to do it yourself?

It will save you time.  That is about it.  It is no secret what will get you to the top of Google.  Its not some guarded methods that is locked away in a special safe that only certain people can access.

The information is everywhere.  There are many websites that tell you exactly what you have to do to get to page one of Google for any keyword you need.

But, do you have the time it takes and the patience it will require to get there?  Do you have the necessary research tools and are you willing to put in the work to read and learn this craft.

What an SEO company will do is help you get to the top of the SERPS, and maps, in less time.  They have relationships around the web and can build links faster than you can.  They can have content writers that can optimize you keywords better than you can because they do it everyday.  They can submit you to all the Internet Yellow Pages around the net to get you as many “citations” as possible (you will need plenty of these if you want to be in A-G on Google Maps).

Take Action No Matter What You Decide

The longer you wait around the more time you give your competition to catch up.  With every passing day more people are getting the message.  It is still way behind where I think it should be but the knowledge gap is narrowing each day.

It will not be long before your biggest competition starts focusing the bulk of their advertising budget online and paying people like me buckets of money to get them to page one of all the search engines.

Many of them are there now strictly by accident.  You can beat them.  They will not know what hit them.