Unless you already have more work than you can handle, con­fidence in your market, and no plans for growth, yes. Why? Because:

• Effective advert­ising drives more sales and a more pos­itive ROI than relying on word-of-mouth and “hope mar­keting”
• Digital mar­keting is far more cost-effective than tra­di­tional broadcast mar­keting (print, radio & TV) because:
  • It can target your ideal cus­tomers — who cost less to sell to — instead of wasting ad spend on everyone else
  • Digital media provides far more rapid, extensive feedback, so can be fine-tuned as you go along
  • It can reach cus­tomers inter­na­tionally, 24/7/365, in the comfort of their own homes/offices, when they are most inter­ested in buying — not on someone else’s pub­lishing schedule.
• Your com­pet­itors are doing it — if you don’t, you’ll lose trade to them

Small firms often try to “save” money by advert­ising less, or not at all. That’s a false economy, because mar­keting drives sales. So even when budget is tight, less mar­keting means less sales — which will usually cost you more than you “saved” by not mar­keting.

Effective digital mar­keting is vital for any business website. So, almost any site can benefit from these cost-effective, flexible packages. If I don’t believe I can help you, I’ll let you know straight away, refunding any payment made.

Still, these packages were designed to boost business for UK SMEs*. So, if you run a small business in the UK, these digital mar­keting & SEO plans are for you.

* Espe­cially small firms near Swansea, Cardiff, Newport, Bristol, Bath, Chel­tenham, Gloucester or Hereford, as that’s my local area. If you’re from other parts of the UK though, I’ll still be happy to help.

Not for you. I do the “heavy lifting” and techie stuff, so that you can stay focused on the rest of your business.

Less than five minutes from now, you could be ticking “Get a digital mar­keting strategy” off your to-do list.  Just click the button to set up the payment plan and that will return you to a short form. Fill that in and send it to me. That’s enough for me to get started.

I will need your input occa­sionally, of course, and there are things you can do to help me help you. If you’re busy though, they can wait.

Likewise, if there’s any­thing you’re unsure of — don’t worry. I’ll walk you through it, so that you can be con­fident about the business decisions you’re making as we go along. That’s what I do.

SEO Plans — illus­trating non-linear power increases

Your website is a mar­keting vehicle, so think of these plans as engines. For given road con­di­tions, more powerful engines tend to offer more accel­er­ation. In this case, your target market and com­pet­ition define the “road” con­di­tions.

From the SEO per­spective, Domain Authority (DA) is like the power of the engine — but on a log­ar­ithmic scale. For example, one DA 40 link is more than twice as powerful as a DA 20 link. That means each plan adds a lot to the one below it.

Likewise, the other digital mar­keting com­ponents get more effective as the plans increase. For instance, infographics are more likely to go viral than simple blog posts, and per­son­alised video (e.g. men­tioning the viewer’s name and hometown) tends to have a greater impact than non-per­son­alised sales videos.

Marketing is a race for customers

Nat­urally then, you’ll want the best “engine” you can afford to run. Still, it’s best to match the plan to your market, too.

Smaller niches and local markets tend to have less com­pet­ition than popular, national or inter­na­tional ones. That lets the smaller plans work more effect­ively.

This means the smaller plans are best suited to local SEO target markets like “Cardiff dentists” or “Bristol vets”. They can also work for very spe­cific niches (aka “long tail keywords”) like “home security systems”. For these markets, the con­sistency and number of cita­tions (non-linked men­tions of your “NAP” info) and reviews can be quite important, too.

Tar­geting broader national and inter­na­tional markets (e.g. “car dealers uk”) usually needs a larger plan. That’s espe­cially true if you’re com­peting with household-name brands.

However, even then, keyword research some­times reveals useful keywords that others have missed. In those cases, a smaller SEO package may just mean slower growth. Still, even slow growth is better than stag­nating without an SEO strategy.

The main factors used by search engines to rank web­sites can mostly be split into the fol­lowing on-page and off-page signals:

Off-page SEO Factors

• Back­links — how many other quality sites link to the target site?
• Social Media — social media mar­keting activity matters

On-Page SEO Factors

• Engagement — do vis­itors click on results, then stay to interact with the site?
• Content — is it rel­evant, well-written, readable and unique?
• Tech­nical quality — code quality, security, speed and mobile-friend­liness matter

Of these, quality back­links are espe­cially important, because getting them takes a lot of work. It’s easy to get spammy back­links by the dozen, but these won’t help your site’s search engine pos­i­tioning. In fact, they could ser­i­ously damage it.

Still, there’s another factor, too: Con­sistency. Search engines want to promote quality sites. Because of this, they act­ively pen­alise quick-fix tactics, to stop folks from ‘gaming’ the system.

That’s flexible. Some ser­vices give the false impression that tar­geting 50 keywords is auto­mat­ically more valuable than tar­geting 10. It simply doesn’t work like that.

In fact, those extra 40 keywords are usually just syn­onyms for your main ones. They may have no real value to you, if your audience never searches for those terms. In any case, Google now under­stands syn­onyms, so focusing on your main keywords will improve your pos­i­tioning for the others anyway.

Besides, SEO also depends on overall site quality. So, as we improve that, rankings for rel­evant phrases will tend to improve across the board.

Whilst keyword research and mon­it­oring is still essential then, the number of keywords tar­geted isn’t an indicator of value. Real­ist­ically, it’s best to target one valuable keyword per page. Your audience — and Google — will appre­ciate the focus.

Likewise, each article created will target one keyword, dir­ecting traffic either to your homepage or the most rel­evant page on your site. If you have a site with lots of pages, we can improve your ranking for lots of rel­evant keywords over time.

Whilst you’re welcome to use my free, multi-channel social media dash­board, these SEO Plus Plans don’t include my done-for-you social media posting or full social media mar­keting ser­vices. Con­sistency is key to those, so it isn’t prac­tical to drop in and out of them month-by-month. As those start from just £5 a day though, they can be a great com­plement to these more general digital mar­keting plans.

Whilst I can help to build dir­ectory cita­tions even on the Starter SEO Plus Plan, Mas­tering Local SEO requires man­aging those over time. You’ll need a special dash­board system to do that easily. As it isn’t prac­tical to switch that on and off on a monthly basis, my Loc­al­Crowd service offers that as a sep­arate sub­scription.

GoCardless sets up Direct Debits cost-effect­ively, pro­cessing your payment data on its own secure site. It takes seconds to set up, but pro­cessing the first payment can take a week or more. That lets me check your site and require­ments before you’re billed. So there’s less risk for you.

Once you have set up the GoCardless payment, you should see a form requesting more details. A copy of this inform­ation will be emailed to you. If my ser­vices don’t seem a good fit for any reason, can­celling the payment is easier than refunding it.

That depends on which tactics you choose, and how you measure results. Most ele­ments of these plans create advert­ising assets that you’ll be able to see promptly. How long those assets take to affect your bottom line — and how dir­ectly they do so — can vary, though.

The “ad man­agement” options tend to drive traffic fastest in the short term, but unlike SEO and other content mar­keting options (e.g. infographics, Press Releases and blogging), ad-driven traffic dies off when you stop spending on them. That’s why SEO and content mar­keting are more cost-effective in the long run.

Whether that traffic con­verts to sales depends on how well your site and offers are optimised to convert them. That’s what “con­version rate optim­isation” is for — as a web designer/marketer, I can help you analyse and fix parts of your site that may be blocking sales.

One other thing to note about meas­uring results is that the common “last touch” approach to attrib­uting success to mar­keting is out­dated and mis­leading. It’s an easy metric to use, but ignores the con­tri­bu­tions of everything apart from the final link-click that leads to a sale. The truth is, every piece of mar­keting makes pro­spects more likely to trust your brand, and to buy. So, you need to look at your stats more care­fully to see what’s really working — and I can help with that.

SEO is strategic

One client’s DA growth: 35 – 48 in 12 months

For the SEO plan ele­ments, the aim is to get you first page pos­i­tioning for search terms that potential cus­tomers really use. That will boost your site traffic with more tar­geted sales leads. That’s a longer-term strategy than some of the other options, though.

The larger SEO plans can do more in a month, and use more powerful tactics. For instance, by default they build stronger back­links, and more of them. So, they tend to provide faster results than the smaller SEO packages. Still, exact times­cales will depend on the com­pet­it­iveness of your market.

NB: A three month minimum term applies to these packages because SEO takes time and per­sistence (usually at least 6 months). You can cancel at any time after that by giving 28 days notice. You can upgrade your plan at any time, of course. So if you need to start small, that’s fine.