A recent report shows that Fortune 500 countries aren’t very good at SEO. This can be very good for small and medium sized businesses who are competing in the same product and service fields with major players. By using a set of sound SEO tactics, you can often get enviable positions on search engines despite the fact that you don’t have a multibillion dollar marketing budget.

One of the advantages you can have as a small business is that you can operate quickly and without the bureaucracy that is associated with big business projects. If you do your own SEO, your changes can be uploaded on your site in a matter of days or weeks. Your link building process is going to be directly relative to the needs of the keywords you’re going after, and a traffic volume that may seem excessive for you might not be sufficient for a large company’s ROI calculations.

How can a small business build winning SEO campaigns in a big business environment? First, you should concentrate on your niche. Large businesses can try to be all things to all people, but they may not be able to produce a specialty that a certain segment of the customer base wants. For example, if a large company is selling athletic shoes, they may not focus too tightly on a particular category of shoes. Therefore, if your SEO efforts are targeted for something like “cross training shoes” or even “shoes made from recycled tires” then you’ve got an area of focus that an in-house SEO team (if they have one) may not be able to concentrate on in the midst of a big campaign.

As time goes on, and big businesses understand the value of SEO, the number of Fortune 500 companies who use SEO will certainly change. However, big business moves slowly when it comes to implementing changes, and SEO can be such an enigma to corporate managers that there could room for small business growth in the search engines for some time. By building small business SEO campaigns now, you can also gain a foothold against competing SEO initiatives down the road.