Recent Survey Confirms SEO is the Most Sought After Promotion for Small Businesses

The recent “merchant confidence survey” from US based lead-gen company MerchantCircle/Reply.com, conducted a survey in November 2011 with 2,500 US small businesses, and has found that search engine optimization (SEO) is the most preferred marketing channel that SME's would choose if they could choose only one.

The businesses being surveyed were each asked the question: “If you had to put all your marketing time and budget into only one channel, what would it be?”

Understandably the choices included several possibilities reflecting the wide variety of choice available to businesses today including: Social media platforms, PPC, SEO, mobile and traditional advertising media. With a staggering 70%, SEO was clearly well ahead of the chasing pack of other key options.

As well it is highly significant to think that coming into 2012, “traditional media” defined as radio, TV, newspapers, magazines and direct mail, was ranked ahead of both Social Media and Paid Media, with newspapers being the highest ranked of the traditional options.

What's even more interesting is that the most common tool used amongst 70% all the respondents was Facebook. Apparently the conclusion here,is that even though SME's are using social media but to less than spectacular effect.

What we need to ask then is, is SEO more powerful or is it that we need to better educate SME's on how to effectively monetarise social media tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube?

What are your thoughts? Until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Daniele.