When INVESP Business Services was born a few months ago, we did not realize the magnitude of importance and difficulty search engine optimization would impact us.  However, we knew that most of our business would have to come from our online clients.

Because of my technical background I assumed that I can easily handle all issues related to search engine optimization for INVESP. I remember thinking to myself that surely it couldn’t be that complicated. Six months later, it finally dawned on me that SEO is going to be one of our greatest obstacles, especially since we rely heavily on traffic to our website.  This has meant that for me, as with any small business owner, although I have about another million things to do, SEO is eating all of my time.

Finally, after long nights and failed attempts, we decided that we should outsource our optimization efforts to a company who specializes in that area. My next task was to find a good firm with a proven track record but keeping our prices low; we are working with a limited budget. Have you ever attempted to Google SEO? Well I did, and discovered tons of sites each claiming to be “the best at,” and “leaders of” SEO. I was at a crossroads, although I needed this service, I knew that hiring the wrong company can damage our business. The risks include being banned from Google because the hired SEO firm violated Google’s rules in their attempt to optimize our site.

After all my research and sleepless nights over this issue, I came to the following conclusions:

1. Be weary.  There are many of companies that claim to be “leaders” in the SEO arena. However, unfortunately many of them do not know what they are doing.
2. You get what you pay for.  Companies with a good reputation charge a lot of money for their services. A small business can not afford to spend 5k or 10k on SEO.

I realize that you get what you pay for, but at the same time, I wonder if there are good, quality SEO firms with proven track record that can help small businesses with a small budget, such as mine?

My quest for finding a solution has not ended yet.