Some people who do search engine optimization consulting will try to make you believe that if you hire the right SEO consultant, that’s all you need to do in order to rank higher in the search engine results.

That’s definitely not the case.

You need to (or your website guy needs to) focus on a whole slew of things if you want to get the most benefit out of having a small business website.

You need a good online business model.

You need good content to start with.

You need the right kind of marketing, be it pay per click marketing or organic.

You need consistently published and interesting new content that encourages other websites to link to yours.

Even the best search engine optimization consultants can’t make a terrible website rank well (at least not for very long). Focus on making your website a useful place for the people you want to know about you to visit, and you’ll be ahead of the game.

It’s harder than it was a year ago to rank well for the terms you want to rank well for, and in a year it’s going to be even harder. Every month you wait to work on your website ranking makes it that much harder to reach your goals.