Well, it’s 2017, a new year. As a San Francisco Bay Area resident, I have been through many business cycles, starting in the mid-1990s, going through the tech bubble of the early 2000’s, and continuing, of course, through the total meltdown that was 2008. 
As anyone who lives in San Francisco can tell you, the traffic and crowds are worse than ever. Simply walking from the 16th St. BART station to the Bay Area Video Coalition, you can see everything from the brouhaha at the Google and Facebook buses to the homeless crisis due to San Francisco’s incredibly expensive housing situation.
I have often thought that when the traffic gets so bad you can hardly move, where the lines at Chipotle are so incredible that one can hardly order a burrito, or, to be frank, when the housing market in Oakland becomes red hot, these are signs of the top of a double. Is that what will help you in 2017? No, it’s not.
SEO – the #1 ROI for Your Small Business
As small business people, we have to ignore the business cycle and look to the long term. As I have worked with many small business people throughout San Francisco and the entire San Francisco Bay Area, I have seen again and again that the most important and highest value activity that they can engage in in their marketing is SEO, search engine optimization. SEO is the art and science of getting your company to the top of Google, Bing, and Yahoo. For small businesses to gain initial exposure to their business, it is important that they introduce the necessary tactics that can help them with this. The best place to start would be to build awareness in their local area so that they can start driving traffic to their websites. There are many different services across the country that will be able to help with this, like these NJ SEO Services, for example. Search engine optimization is one of the most important factors to think about when owning and starting a successful business. Search engines are where people go, first, for information. So, you had better “be there” as part of your 2017 marketing strategy!
Now, admittedly, there have been many changes in the past few years. Among the most important is the transition to mobile search. Google calls this mobile first. Now, I am a bit of a skeptic as to whether people buy certain products such as, for example, a hair transplant on their mobile phone. They certainly buy pizza, or look for an Uber, on their mobile phone. Accordingly, if you are interested in search engine optimization for your San Francisco small business, you need to think about the mobile phone, but you need to be skeptical as to whether that is truly important to your business. It depends. For some businesses, mobile is indeed important. But for others it isn’t very important. It depends.
Circling back to 2017 however, it is without a doubt that search engine optimization is probably the highest return on investment for your business. It will blow the socks off of AdWords or other forms of paid advertising, and, in most situations, will also be more effective than social media. In summary, if you are interested in tackling search engine optimization for 2017, there is no time like the present. Reach out to me for a consultation, or, of course, there are my new books on Amazon on both search engine optimization and social media marketing!
