You are a Singapore-based company and thinking of implementing an SEO campaign for your website. You aren’t sure if it’s worth spending the money - perhaps PPC or banner advertising is a better option. If this sounds all too familiar, read on before you make that decision.

The answer? It depends.

SEO involves a relatively high upfront cost, depending on whether you’re a huge corporation or a home business owner. As much as I would like to sell my SEO services, alas, it DOES NOT work for everyone. Ideally, you should implement SEO as a long-term plan and supplement your marketing efforts with online advertising (e.g. PPC, banners) for the short to medium-term if you have the budget.

Consider the following:
a) your target market
b) your marketing goals
c) your competition

For illustration purpose, let’s use LarryLim.NET as an example.

1) Target Market
My primary target market is Singapore, although I do entertain overseas SEO job enquiries from time to time. With a population of only 4 million and an estimated 2.2 million Internet subscribers, would my SEO campaign be futile? Out of the already-small-number, I’d be looking for potential customers who ran a business, owned a website and wanted SEO.

Instead of guessing, I ran a Google Adwords campaign for 3 weeks in January targetting Singapore searches for “seo” and “search engine optimization”. In total, my ad was displayed over 2,200 times during that period. Although not entirely accurate due to competitor searches and the ad being displayed multiple times to the same user, it gave an indication for achieving my marketing goals, i.e. the “small” number was still good enough for my low volume, high value business model.

2. Marketing Goals
I wanted to obtain strong rankings in search engine results for 2 reasons:

a) Credibility & Branding
Every player in the Singapore SEO niche would be trying to out-do one another for keyphrases like “singapore seo”, “singapore seo consultant” and “singapore search engine optimization”. Hence, I could quickly establish myself as a credible SEO consultant by ranking high for those keyphrases.

b) Generate Sales Leads
Assuming that I had to pay S$3,500 for an SEO job and I have a profit margin of S$1,000 per job, that means that I could recover my cost by the fourth job. Any sales after that would be pure profit so S$3,500 isn’t such a risky investment for me.

3 . Competition
Singapore only has a handful of SEO players, and the ones I knew were either Indian-based companies or web designers moonlighting as consultants. Although some looked like big companies, many were actually operating from home and using “virtual offices” as their cover. The keyphrases I was targetting weren’t that competitive either at less than 1,500,000 results. What this meant was that I stood a good chance at ranking high for my targetted keywords and converting my traffic to customers.

The Results (Drumroll)…
In less than 5 months, I had achieve the following rankings on Google:
- #1 of 1,380,000 results for “singapore seo”
- #1 of 980,000 results for “singapore seo consultant”
- #1 of 1,180,000 results for “singapore seo services”
- #4 of 1,480,000 results for “singapore search engine optimization”
- #1 of 1,170,000 results for “singapore search engine optimization consultant”
- #3 of 1,340,000 results for “singapore search engine optimization services”

All in all, I received traffic from close to 500 search strings for March thus far. More importantly, I had achieve my marketing goals of credibility, brand-building and generating sales leads, specifically:
- 2 partnerships.
- 4 SEO jobs (2 more close to finalization).
- 1 invitation to speak at a high-level conference.

SEO did work for me!
Will it work for you? I wouldn’t know until you ask me. ;)

P/S: in case you’re wondering if your industry may be a little “odd” for SEO, you’d be interested to know that I’ve received Singapore SEO job enquiries from a wide range of people, i.e. from a telco to a property agent, a golf club manufacturer, financial consultant and even a florist and spiritual healing practitioner.