Businesses often don’t have enough funds to properly do SEO on their website, or are not educated enough to make wise decisions about it.

This statement was true about me a few years ago. I started an “internet” company a while back. I thought this was going to be easy…you know…build a great tool and people will come from far and wide to see how great my product was. I spent 30K on development of the product (basically an online application). I also wanted to make sure that search engines could find my site properly, so I hired a local SEO firm to perform a keyword study for me. I had no idea what I was doing, but I had heard a bit about this SEO stuff, and figured it was a good thing to do.

I spent $3000 on a keyword study that basically gave me a list of keywords that should drive traffic to my site. To be fair, the SEO firm I hired does know what they are talking about, but without the knowledge of how to use these keywords or where to place them on my site, I was lost. They tried to explain, but the terms they used were way over my head at the time. The other services (link building, explanation of where to put keywords into the content etc… cost more money, which I didn’t have). This experience made me pretty jaded towards SEO, especially when I found other tools like WordTracker that could have helped me for a fraction of the price.

Years later, I realized that the keywords I helped create with this SEO company were not correct at all, as the product and target customer changed so the keywords need to change as well. Bottom line is…I wasn’t wise enough in my business to know how to spend my limited budget with SEO.

Most business owners that I start chatting with have no clue about SEO or even some of the basic terminology in SEO. If the pitch is right (which usually has something to do with generating more traffic to the site or getting better rankings), then they are hooked. The problem is, this opens the doors for some pretty shady tactics, or high priced services that don’t give anything more than a managed pay per click campaign.

This industry is still in its infancy, so with good SEO’s rising to the top and educating the business owners about the industry, I believe that better decisions will get made.