Small Business SEO Packages Plus Digital Marketing

Small firms often try to “save” money by advert­ising less, or not at all (aka “hope mar­keting”). That’s a false economy, because mar­keting drives sales. So less mar­keting means less sales. That often costs far more than it “saves”.

Digital mar­keting is far more cost-effective than tra­di­tional broadcast mar­keting (print, radio & TV) because it:

• Targets your ideal cus­tomers. So, no more wasting ad spend on everyone else
• Provides far more rapid, extensive feedback, so it can be fine-tuned as you go along
• Reaches cus­tomers inter­na­tionally, 24/7/365, when they are most inter­ested in buying.

Your com­pet­itors are doing it, so can you really afford not to?

Almost any business can benefit from these cost-effective, flexible digital mar­keting packages. Still, they were designed for UK SMEs*. So, if you run a small business in the UK, these digital mar­keting & SEO plans are for you.

* Espe­cially those seeking an SEO company near Cardiff, Newport, Bristol, Bath, Swansea, Chel­tenham, Gloucester and Hereford. That’s just because I prefer to meet clients when pos­sible, though. So if you’re further afield, that’s fine.

Not for you. Less than five minutes from now, you could be ticking “Get a digital mar­keting strategy” off your to-do list.

So just click the button to set up the payment plan and that will return you to a short form. Then fill that in and send it to me. That’s enough for me to get started.

I do the “heavy lifting” so that you can stay focused on the rest of your business. I’ll need your input occa­sionally, of course, but we’ll take that step by step.

SEO packages — illus­trating non-linear power increases

Your website is a mar­keting vehicle, so think of these SEO plans as engines. Your target market and com­pet­ition define the road con­di­tions, whilst Domain Authority (DA) is like engine power. So you’ll want the best “engine” you can afford.

One DA 30 link can be twice as powerful as a DA 20 link, though. So each plan adds a lot to the one below it. Other com­ponents get more effective on larger plans, too.

Still, the smaller plans are best suited to low-com­pet­ition niches in local SEO target markets. Local searches also depend on dir­ectory listings and reviews. That’s where my Loc­al­Crowd service can help.

If you’re tar­geting broader national and inter­na­tional markets or com­peting with well known brands though, you’ll need a bigger plan.

I aim to help smaller busi­nesses grow. That includes boot­strapped (self-funded) startups and micro-busi­nesses like sole traders and part­ner­ships with fewer than 10 employees. So I do under­stand that some­times, even finding £5 a day can be tricky. Whilst there’s a limit on what can be done for less, I can offer a few sug­ges­tions.

First, a couple of points that may seem obvious, but I’ve seen many startups get con­fused about them:

• Mar­keting isn’t a cost — it’s an investment that helps to boost sales. Unlike costs, cutting invest­ments under­mines success. So small firms often struggle simply because their com­pet­itors are spending more on mar­keting. Whatever you do, aim to grow your mar­keting budget over time.
• If you provide recurring ser­vices, make sure you know your Average Cus­tomer Lifetime Value (ACLV). If you average just £25 monthly profit per cus­tomer, and they typ­ically stay with you for six months or more, each new cus­tomer is worth at least £150, not £25. So on my “Starter” plan, you’d only need to average one new cus­tomer per month to break even.

Still, how can you build your business on a lower budget? Well, quality back­links are vital for boosting search pos­i­tioning — but poor quality (under DA10+) links won’t help much, and can even harm your SEO. So avoid “cheaper” low-quality bulk link-building ser­vices. They’re a false economy that can cost you far more in the long run.

Instead, aim to earn good back­links by reg­u­larly pub­lishing quality content on your site. Then promote it on social media — and ideally, contact others who may be inter­ested in linking to it from their own sites.

Pub­lishing new content reg­u­larly can be rel­at­ively easy if your site includes a blog — but art­icles still take time to write. If you struggle to find time for that, check out my content mar­keting ser­vices, which start at just £75 per month.

If you’ve heard of Page Rank, then yes, it’s like Google’s Page Rank. Google retired that years ago, so third-party sites started meas­uring site and page quality instead. Domain Authority (“DA”) is perhaps the most direct replacement, and scores sites from 0 to 100. The higher you get, the harder it gets to improve. So most sites have a DA under 10. Getting over 20 takes time and effort, but getting over 30 takes a lot more. That’s why links from those sites are such powerful endorse­ments. Google trusts them.

Whilst back­links make a big dif­ference, many other factors affect your site’s search engine per­formance. The ones that can be fixed by changing your site dir­ectly are called “On Page SEO” factors. These include:

• Mobile friend­liness — because most web traffic now uses mobile devices
• Code quality — poor coding can hurt your rankings, even if the site seems to work
• Content — “content is king”. So is it rel­evant, well-written, readable and unique?
• Struc­tured data — adding special tags to certain types of data (e.g. addresses) helps search engines
• Engagement — how often do vis­itors click on your search results? Do they then stay on your site for long?
• Site speed — vis­itors don’t like slow sites, so neither do search engines
• Site security — vis­itors and search engines prefer sites with SSL security.

This option helps with the cre­ation and man­agement of your Facebook ads. Spe­cifically, it includes:

If you’d rather use a video ad in place of the image, I offer cost-effective short sales videos, too.

Your Facebook ad spend isn’t included in this, as that varies within the limits you set. A minimum ad budget of £75 per month is recom­mended. Ad budgets over £1,000 per month will need extra man­agement — please contact me for prices.

Most sites have meas­urable goals, like con­verting vis­itors to cus­tomers. However, DIY web design tends to leave this to chance. Pro­fes­sional web designers study which design fea­tures tend to increase con­version rates. We use that to design funnels that guide site vis­itors towards con­version.

There’s still trial-and-error involved in any spe­cific situ­ation, but we have struc­tured ways of doing that and effective tools to measure results. That is “Con­version Rate Optim­isation”, or “CRO”.

That’s flexible. Some ser­vices imply that 50 target keywords are better than 10. It’s not that simple, though.

Those extra 40 keywords are often just syn­onyms for your main ones, However, Google now under­stands syn­onyms. So focusing on your main keywords will improve your pos­i­tioning for the others.

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

Real­ist­ically then, it’s best to target one valuable keyword per page. Your audience — and Google — will appre­ciate the focus.

Likewise, each article created targets one keyword, dir­ecting traffic to a rel­evant page on your site. So, if your site has many pages, we can improve your ranking for lots of keywords over time.

That depends on which tactics you choose, and how you measure results. The content these plans create will be visible straight away. How long they take to affect your bottom line can vary, though.

Notably, the “last touch” approach to meas­uring mar­keting is mis­leading. That’s because it only credits sales to the last thing viewed. That drastically under­values all the other mar­keting that built trust and developed the lead. 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 popular search terms. That will boost your site traffic with more tar­geted sales leads.

The larger SEO plans can do more each month, and use more powerful tactics. So, they tend to provide faster results than the smaller SEO packages. Still, exact times­cales will depend on the com­pet­it­iveness of your market.

N.B.: A three month minimum term applies because SEO takes time (usually at least 6 months). You can cancel at any time after that by giving 28 days notice. You can also upgrade your plan at any time. So if you’d prefer to start small, that’s fine.