When my parents were growing up, their dinner table was often surrounded by at least 6 or 7 kids. (My father had 8 siblings, my mother had 5). The common story between those two families is this: the dinner plate went around the table once. Second helpings were an uncommon luxury.

The current small business environment in the U.S. economy gives me a vibe like this story. More and more often, small businesses get one meaningful chance at convincing a prospect that theirs is the correct answer.

The usage trend along internet marketing and search marketing supports this. For a number of reasons, usage of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN / Bing) has grown dramatically. Google alone logged 87 billion searches in the month of December, 2009, up 46 percent from December, 2008.

Despite that near-ridiculous growth in search activity from a year ago, many search users still avoid even the 2nd page of results when searching, opting rather to refine their search query or select a first page option.

This tendency has created an environment for internet marketers where competition has become fierce to achieve first page organic search rankings. Page two and page three just don’t cut it, and there are very specific reasons why.

Anecdotally, if you lose your keys and then have to look for them, where do you find them? Obviously, in the last place you looked for them. The same is true of consumers and B2B decision makers. The place where they make their decision is the one where a good enough answer is presented.

I know that’s stupidly intuitive, but simmer on the implications for a minute. The point is NOT that people are lazy, stupid, etc. It is that search users will only look as long as they have to. If they find a good answer on page one of their search results, why would they go any further?

For this reason, proper keyword research and concisely defining vertical markets are critical for the success of any search marketing activity. Without proper targets in organic search marketing small business owners would be better served by setting money on fire (I’m sure it’s on Youtube, somewhere) and hoping the smoke attracted customers. (Obviously, I’m not condoning this for legal reasons).

So, before you go setting things on fire do some keyword research (and pass the potatoes, please).