With the economy proving to be a much more difficult environment for the business owner to navigate and keep afloat, a good marketing campaign is more important than ever. However, the old style of advertising is costly and is being replaced by a new generation of media that is more powerful and provides a way to speak directly and instantly to the targeted audience. No longer do we need to rely on costly print and tv advertising to do the “talking” for us.

The bad news: it’s not enough to just have a website and a yellow-pages ad. Companies that want to survive in today’s business climate need to adapt to the fact that consumers are ever more critical and savvy and it is the search engines who decide who gets indexed, ranked and ultimately found.

The good news: there are ways to reach consumers (yes, they are still out there!) and turn the casual internet user into a long standing customer.

First, throw out all the old concepts of advertising and marketing and put your “new-school” hat on. A small business owner who wishes to remain competitive and relevant in today’s global market needs to embrace all of the new mediums, web applications and tools (such as organic SEO techniques) that have surfaced over the last ten years. Many of them are less than five years old (Twitter for example)! So, it’s not too late to join the crowd and get a company found by all those customers that most people do not think exist anymore.

A good question any business owner should be asking is “Can Google find me?” Meaning, when a potential customer is looking for (service or product) what a business offers are they finding them on the first page of the search results or is their website buried under thousands of search results? If the answer is “no” then there is work to do.

A great place to start is with a good old fashioned site analysis. By hiring a professional seo consultant a business can have their website, and their competitor’s site, analyzed to see where some simple “organic” seo can be utilized. There may be some very simple and straightforward “fixes” that can get the site seen in a better light by Google and Yahoo!.

The second step, get noticed by peers and enthusiasts. These days there is a web-forum for every industry and hobby imaginable. Business owners need to become “authorities” on their subject and to be seen as having the answers for all those problems (isn’t that why people are searching on the internet after all?) that need to be answered. Example; http://forums.seochat.com/ is a great place for SEO consultants and do-it-yourselfers to chat, exchange tips and hints as well as get their links on a “quality” website. Every time a person post to the forum their company’s url will be posted too. This is a great way to get some free advertising. It just takes a little sweat and time.