Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

Just from what you've said, and not knowing the real details of your market and situation, I question whether serious SEO is going to be worth the time/investment for you. Without some keywords that your target audience might be using, what would you look at as a metric for SEO? For what keyword(s) do you want to have a high ranking?

Regardless of that important strategic issue, it can take a long time to get a great natural search ranking -- months or years. For a small company, you will probably want to look at other marketing approaches, and not pour a lot of money into SEO right away. You'll wand some short-term payback while you wait for SEO to start to payoff for you.

I'd be willing to learn enough more to make specific suggestions, if you're interested. No cost or obligation. Let me know by contacting me directly using the email address in my profile. (I'm located nearby in Connecticut.)

If you can define the problem you're solving or the benefit you can deliver for customers in key words or phrases at all, then you can get some traction with SEO-- possibly even in a month or two, since you say you have little or no direct competition.

But if you want a short-term test, check the traffic on those key phrases in Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool. If traffic is very low, in other words, if few customers are doing searches for those benefits, that might indicate that your customers are not aware they have a problem, or an opportunity. You'll need to talk to some live customers to get a feel for the language they use to describe what your product does for them.

If there is some traffic on any of the phrases, you can get some immediate feedback by doing some time-and-cost limited pay-per-click advertising on Google Adwords. You'll get response in hours, not months. (You'd probably want to run for at least a week, and not until after Jan. 1, to try various combinations.)

But you're more likely to find success by going to the very specific associations, industry vendor directories, and possibly narrow social networks where your prospects are hiding out. And that will be necessary whether ppc or SEO.

If you're ready to let your competitors know what you're up to, the fastest way to get exposure cheaply is to get some press -- not in the monthly trade journals which have long lead times, but in business or industry weeklies.

I know you would like to know rates, but we could be accused of price-fixing if we discussed them together like this. You'll just have to call one or two more SEO consultants to see if you can establish a range.

By the way, if anyone does promise to get you to the top of search results pages in days or weeks, run the other way! There are "black hat" techniques which do work-- until Google catches you and puts you at the bottom. Ask JC Penney last Christmas season.