5 top small business services to help drive your business online in 2012

"Looking for ways to reduce costs and improve efficiency with the best small business services?" This list of the top 5 small business services, 2012, will help you to streamline and grow your own business.

The small business services listed here focus primarily on technology and/or online product and service offerings.

In order to qualify for inclusion into our top 5 list of the best small business services, all of the winners need to be verifiable high quality, growing in popularity, innovative or unique in some way, and, above all else, must add significant value.

Top 5 small business services, 2012

In order to provide you with a great range of services, we've compiled this top 5 list using only one company or offering from a single category - in other words, you won't find three web hosting services or two eCommerce providers.

In particular, you'll find leading products and services in the following pivotal business categories:

• Telecommunications
• SEO
• Help desk
• eCommerce
• Printing

Hopefully you'll find something useful depending on your current and near-future business requirements.

In an effort to be fair, there's also an "honorary mentions" section at the bottom of the page listing other, high quality services and products that didn't quite make it into the top 5 list.

1. RingCentral virtual phone and fax

Interested in seeing how cloud based office communications simplify things? RingCentral offers the next step in the evolution of business communications. It offers all the functionality a business needs, without setting up clunky PBX systems.

Why RingCentral is a winner:

Any service that can drastically cut the barrier to entry for startups and small businesses is a winner in my book. RingCentral does this beautifully. Setting up office communications using RingCentral is quick (minutes), requires no technical skills or specialized hardware, and is cost-effective and scalable.

RingCentral also comes with a no-risk free trial.

2. Analytics SEO

Analytics SEO plugs into your Google analytics to provide deeper insight into your SEO and Google search rankings.

Why Analytics SEO is a winner:

Since SEO is such a huge part of driving valuable organic SEO traffic, Analytics SEO serves to both improve your ability to understand organic search and make informed decisions on how to improve rankings and visibility.

The improvements and benefits derived from using Analytics SEO lead to an average "increase in conversions of over 85% and traffic by 180%". Plug those numbers into your business and decide if that's something you could live with.

3. sysaid

sysaid offers web based help desk tools that allow you to streamline, automate and manage service requests.

Why sysaid is a winner:

sysaid allows you to leapfrog years of help desk development and training by offering everything your business needs in one place. In the long run this can represent huge savings in cost and man-hours.

By offering an all-in-one helpdesk solution (think online support chats, calendars and scheduling, system monitoring, password services, etc), sysaid is able to reduce the technical burden associated with implementing world-class support features, quickly and easily.