Jatin Patro - Escaping SEO and Amazon: the Online Transformation/Survival Guide for Small Businesses

My young daughter recently started her first business. She sells a custom homemade toy called slime, a viscous, colorful substance popular with kids. Her primary motivation is to help her favorite nonprofit, the Gorilla Foundation, through donations. A secondary goal is to prepare for college by earning $20,000 in five years through her entrepreneurial effort. Its a good start for a young entrepreneur with charitable intentions, and I helped her with her business registration and built her a basic website to sell her product online.

The result was Sunstreak Slimes, a company based in Oregon.

She formally launched her products during a holiday bazaar at her school. We were pleasantly surprised to find hers was the most popular of all vendor spots at the market, and as a bonus, an attendee asked her to cover a birthday party.

Success at the bazaar validated her business model and the demand for her products, and made her enthusiastic about taking it online. I managed to place one of her products, Avalanche Slime, on the first page of Googles search results, gave her a crash course on online success, and left her to take it from there. It was an opportunity for her to experience, firsthand, the real - world challenges of running a business.

Days, weeks, and months passed. Her site wasnt updated regularly, her ranking for Avalanche Slime slipped, and her impact was as good as nonexistent. I love making slime but not writing about it, she explained.

Schoolwork has to consume most of any childs waking hours, and beyond that is a constant tug - of - war between family time and personal timeand no time for boring content updates, especially to a website that already has enough content to guide the visitor in making a purchase.

If my daughter sells exclusively at local markets, she has a real chance of making her five - year goal. Farmers markets, downtown markets, and local markets in general are steadily growing in number because they embrace the time - tested values of localism in a true community sense. Theres a sense of belonging in such markets, with interactive conversations and high levels of confidence in buying and selling.

On the other hand, if my daughter confines herself to selling at local markets, there wont be time for schoolwork, family activities, or any of the other components to a balanced childhood. Thats simply not acceptable. So theres little choice but to take her business online, and the online representation of her as a vendor is her website. That doesnt mean that she wont still be targeting local markets; she just needs to do it in a way thats efficient.

The problem is that the internet doesnt define local markets very clearly. The default position for online search isnt local, but global. In order to target a local market online, vendors have to compete globally.

The practice of SEO, or search engine optimizationthe online process through which vendors connect potential buyers to their products by luring web crawlers to their sitesis a moving target that has become a prerequisite for every business wanting to succeed online. To my mind, SEO should actually stand for search engine overhead , and its an expensive overhead thats neither practical nor effective for the majority of small businesses, which consequently turn to paid services and advertisements, and those advertisements generally end up further draining resources and adding to the small businesspersons struggle.

Its not just search engines that pose a threat to local online businesses; the threat is also from online marketplaces, especially Amazon. Half of all online retail shoppers today skip search engines altogether and go directly to Amazon, reducing retailers ability to benefit from search engine optimization by more than half. Sellers on Amazons platform are essentially helping Amazon itself grow in exchange for a new sales channelone that doesnt offer any promise of success.

The threat from Amazon has traditionally been to small retailers, but as the corporate giant increasingly expands into local markets, the threat will soon be to independent service providers, restaurants, farmsjust about every industry.

Many retailers have tried to become part of the Amazon success story, looking to share the pie that is Amazons market share. My daughter tried opening a seller account with Amazon, but the process dictated by Amazon to list her few products involved far more overhead than she could commit to.

Amazon is clearly not a solution. Its part of the problem.

Online marketplaces, especially Amazon, are what pose a threat to small and local businesses.

My daughter isnt alone.

Online technology, trends, and innovation have evolved in favor of globalism while neglecting localism. In the current online landscape, small businesses are left with no choice online but to scramble and embrace the overhead of competing in an unfavorable global landscape, irrespective of their desire and ability to serve local customers.

Survival of the fittest is only fair if the playing field is leveland the online playing field is far from level. Current trends increasingly favor the biggest online players. When Google takes shoppers and puts them on a path that inevitably starts with big brand names, Google becomes a threat to smaller businesses. In an online landscape where even traditional large companies are losing relevance, what chance do independent small and local businesses have? Just as Amazon isnt the solution, neither is SEO. Instead of investing more and more time, money, and effort into SEO, the best solution is to escape it altogether.

If SEO becomes irrelevant, then the playing field levels off. That doesnt mean the process will be easy: the internet accepts Googles and Amazons terms as normative, and change means challenging the status quo.

Survival of the fittest is only fair if the playing field is level.