I get two or three new business calls a week. It’s typically a business owner who needs to improve her web marketing, but has no idea what it will cost to get to the top of the search results. Or, it’s a sales guy in a company who is looking for a quick fix, to make his numbers for the quarter. Both get a quick, free assessment, and it usually doesn’t include my recommendation that they sign up for search engine optimization.

Having a small business myself, I know how much I needed sales in the early days, and how much I have had to learn about marketing to understand where sales come from. Have you ever noticed how few advertising agencies advertise? That should tell you something about marketing professional services.

When it comes to web marketing, the small local business owner is clueless about what tools are available. One of the most powerful is absolutely free: signing up for a business listing on Google Maps. Local results are often at the very top of the search engine results, right where you want to be found.

The other recommendation I make is to try pay per click advertising. For a modest budget, maybe $300-600 a month, you can advertise on the most popular search terms for your business, and target only local prospects. Over a few months, you will gather data on what search terms are resulting in traffic, which terms actually turn into business, and how much it costs to be present when people are shopping. Since a full SEO program costs at least a couple thousand dollars a month, PPC advertising can help you test the waters and see if search marketing is profitable for your business. This is a test we recommend, before you make the financial commitment to use SEO to show up on top of the rankings, based on your site’s merits and not ad dollars. If PPC works for you, and you know that only 18% of B2B prospects click on those ads, then SEO starts to look like a better investment.

As you would expect from a marketing company working on our direction for the future, we have been homing in on our differentiation. Surprisingly, there are a lot of search marketing companies which don’t have much real marketing experience. Because it’s web marketing, companies tend to skew young, to have a hip, wired, energetic company. However, a company full of marketing newbies may not be a good fit if you need a business partner entrusted with bottom line performance. It isn’t hard to do PPC, and any web person can add tags to a site, but real agency- and client-side marketing management experience is hard to come by. Since we happen to have a lot of that (and some of us have some gray hair to go along with it), it’s an important part of our identity. And, we’ve realized that a lot of our joy in doing our jobs comes from helping our clients understand how web marketing works, so we are focusing our future on education, strategy and reporting.

From this most recent study from eMarketer, it looks like marketing executives are really coming up to speed on two important issues: marketing basics (any economic downturn spurs both a drive toward “back to basics” in budgeting and an emphasis on measurement and then reporting on ROI) and, surprisingly, search engine optimization. From our viewpoint, SEO is the foundation of modern marketing, especially if you are marketing to businesses…it’s nice to see our client-side marketing peers mention it as both a trend and as an almost fundamental emphasis.