Classic Marketing has always been the opulent playground of large companies with even larger budgets, but the ascendancy of the internet has levelled the playing field. SEO can be a solution for the vast majority of companies and, for once, not only can small to medium businesses compete with the big guys, they may even have an advantage.

The legendary marketing guru Seth Godin has written about ‘why small is the new big’, but it goes deeper than that. SEO often just works better for smaller companies. Here are a few reasons why small businesses often find the tables turned in their favour when it comes to online marketing:

It’s Cheaper, so Smaller Companies can Compete

Many people say SEO is not cheap, but it depends on your reference point. In a marketing sense, it is true that it’s not as cheap as someone seeing a hand painted sign in your shop window, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than any conversions made through TV, radio or newspaper advertising. It achieves these low cost conversions because, while traditional media advertising takes a more shotgun approach (a fair proportion of those who see it won’t be interested), SEO is far more targeted: people are actively searching for the product you want to advertise!

The lower cost of entry levels the playing field significantly, and it’s not uncommon to see small unknown brands outstripping the bigger guns – especially when it comes to long tail keywords. Just look at the poor Search Engine Optimisation of some of our biggest high street brands.

Smaller Companies are Adaptable

Smaller companies are usually quicker, more efficient and adaptable. This is absolutely vital when it comes to SEO: red tape makes SEO recommendations difficult to implement.

Consider a company the size of, say, Tesco. With the number of employees they have, doing something as simple as changing a metatag would have to go through umpteen members of staff, be officially sanctioned and possibly changed along the way – maybe via multiple offices. After this, it would take several weeks for the company’s developers to upload the changes – and that’s assuming the site’s architecture is friendly to such changes. Imagine if you needed to make wholesale changes – like changing a site designed wholly in flash (which search engines struggle with) to html. It can be done, but it’ll take weeks or even months to sanction, and as a result the site will take a long time to improve its search engine rankings.

Now consider a smaller company: 5 employees, 1 office – no problem. An email sent around and approved within half an hour. A small change will probably be implemented within the day, and the site can get far quicker results.

There’s Room to Carve a Niche

We do love to preach the niche, but with very good reason. Increasingly, small niches are where the good returns are to be found in online marketing, and once again this is where small business has an advantage over the big guns.

Niche marketing is by its definition, smaller. Most big businesses can’t cover their overheads by tackling the niche, and have to be broader in their scope. However in many cases, customers want a company who can appeal to their specific interests and there’s plenty of money to be made here – just not enough for those with hundreds of staff members. For a small or medium sized company, it’s ideal!

A real world example: holidays are a competitive area, so burrow down further. Holidays in the Caribbean, better still. How about holidays in Bermuda? If you find this area still too competitive you can go further – diving holidays in Bermuda. The numbers of interested people get smaller as you go along, but as long as there’s enough people looking, the return on investment can be easily enough to cover the outlay.

You’ll be surprised at the effect an SEO campaign can have upon the sales of even a small, unknown brand. While you’re unlikely to topple the likes of Nike and Coca Cola overnight, strong optimisation can at least see you carving out your own happy niche and improving your business beyond your expectations…