The owner of a higher-end laser hair removal clinic called me the other day looking to increase the visibility of her website.  Put bluntly, her site is invisible, and she acknowledged that it gets very little traffic; certainly none of her new clients come from finding it during a search.

I described ‘Search Engine Optimization’ (SEO) and what it could do for her.  I described a Pay Per Click campaign, email campaigns, best practices for getting visitors to her site to convert, and how to set up an automatic drip-nurturing campaign for the resulting prospects list.

She said it sounds fantastic, what does it cost?  I said three or four thousand to start and that again to keep it all running for a year.  She said “Three thousand?  Wow, that’s a lot of money”, and indicated that was simply too much money to spend on her website.  I asked her what she does right now for marketing, and she launched into a proud description of how she had, in the not-too-distant past, spent $10,000 on a TV ad which ran for a few weeks, and which she reported a lot of her existing customers had seen and had congratulated her on.

The point of my little tale is to demonstrate that the perceived status the TV ad brought her was added to the meager ROI of 1-4%. Presented with a less expensive marketing option that would outperform the TV ad for months and maybe years, it was none-the-less devoid of status.

Her mindset (and the mindset of the majority) couldn’t conceive that as an SMB her website could become the primary driver of her business.  Regardless of what SEO did for her business, her mindset wasn’t going to bring her to proudly boast to anyone of her post SEO massive increase in unique visitors,  let alone an Alexa ranking or Google page rank.

Secondly what this means is that, as an SMB, most of your competitors are still stuck in an old mindset (you’re not, my evidence is that you are reading this blog), spending 64.6% of their budget on expensive TV ads, often because for them, psychologically, TV ads are the gold standard bringing them a feeling of “my company has reached the big time”.  This feeling persists regardless of how expensive TV ads are, or how many DVRs are being bought to skip them.  Since the days of the Apple 1984 ad things have changed; the effectiveness of TV ads is sliding, today 85% of B2B buyers go online during the purchasing process, and 83% found the vendor from which they eventually purchased online [source].  This is handing you a golden opportunity to outperform your competitors by simply focusing on what delivers the best ROI: Automatic Web Marketing.