Youtube Video Marketing | SEO,SMM | Online Marketing | Affiliate & CPA Marketing | Wordpress: Which is the most powerful for Small Business: SEO, SMO, Local Search, or PPC?

Each of the options you mention above have benefits and also limitations. For example, PPC is immediate, in the sense that you can set up a campaign with Adwords, Facebook ads, Linkedin, or Bing and Yahoo, and within 24 hours you'll have a pretty good idea if it's working or not, and can tweak and edit as you see fit, to find a positive ROI. The risk is you spend alot of money testing and don't find the result you are looking for. SEO and local search is beneficial if you can find a creditable SEO company or individual who can also provide a sound ROI. Right now, SEO is changing dynamically and it's very tricky for a small business to get a handle on what is working and what is not. There is obviously a cost, but at least you're assuming your are using an expert in the field. Local optimisation works really well if you can optimise your citation listings correctly, and then actually develop SEO strategies around those citations, just like you would a website. To answer your question, I believe PPC and SEO both have a respectable benefit for small businesses, but it depends in your niche, budget, and risk appetite. Both work really well when done properly, both can be costly when not! http://www.silicondales.com.au

Small businesses don't have time to evaluate the options and so they usually try and test the most convincing options and their success metric is usually the cash register. They understand SEO but they value the maps and hyperlocal search more if they are local businesses. They understand review sites and need help maintaining and monitoring their web presence. My advice to every small business is to allocate time for digital marketing. Find a way to show case the story of the small business through content marketing. Make sure their local listings are accurate. Have a monitoring and responding strategy for reputation management. Engage with their customers through email. Add AdWords PPC to the marketing mix depending on the business and the competition. If they are a new business it may be more important to advertise to get the word out.

What type of business and what size is the budget, or is there no budget? SEO is very important. It takes time and effort but drives free, sustainable traffic so you'll want to put effort into your SEO strategy, and sooner is better. For your SEO strategy you will also need to create good content (e.g. blogs) and build your social presence, so that ties in with SMO. But SMO will likely not drive immediate results for you as it's more for building brand awareness and can take some effort creating and managing content. Local optimization is important if you are hyper-local: you should optimize your Yelp, bing places for business, google my business pages. Excluding Yelp or PPC ads, all of these are free. If you are a direct response business with a budget, PPC can do well for you because it drives immediate, high-intent traffic. But it can take a little expertise to set up. You can use a site like http://www.wordstream.com/ or a local agency though to manage your PPC campaign. You can also consider running local ads in places like yellowpages, yelp, a newspaper or local community site.

While each of these methods can be useful and effective, you'll definitely get the best ROI with SEO content marketing. If you are able to reach a potential customer through an organic search, you'll be reaching them when they are most likely to act, be it to make an immediate purchase or otherwise engage with your business. At the very least they will become aware of your brand and offerings and will be able to refer back when they are ready to act. For local businesses, local search engine optimization can be effectively incorporated into the overall content strategy. For example, a dentist in Denver would optimize content for a search targeting "Denver root canals" rather than just "root canals".

I really like how Jono Farrington broke down the different options.  My thoughts would be to take a look over your analytics to see where you're at, what is bringing you good traffic, what you would like to improve or capitalize on more, then get some goals in mind.  From there you can do some research for what will work best for achieving your goals.

Good answers here.  My only addition is use PPC to test and get feedback quickly.  Use the dominant winner from your PPC experiments as campaigns for your SEO and SMO.  The reason I say this is that it is quite unpredictable to see when Google has applied your SEO efforts.   Likewise, you want to test PPC with dark posts first before you decide which  post to make public to your followers.

I think you should know consider how the customers are getting in touch with your brand. From my personal experience there are sort of small businesses where marketing channels like you'v mentioned are very important. Consider how people are searching for nearest doctor office, restaurants, wedding photographers, key repair, etc.