Affordable SEO Packages For Small Business

Because your site can’t make sales without vis­itors. Search engines are a great source of free vis­itors who are searching for what you offer. So getting onto page one for the right terms can easily increase your site traffic by 10x — and your sales by even more.

Still, over 90% of searchers only click on the first page of results. That’s why SEO is so important — and so com­pet­itive. You have very little chance of getting it right by guesswork alone.

SEO pro­motes your site for spe­cific search terms (aka “keywords”). However, guessing at those phrases just wastes time and money. People just don’t always search for the phrases you’d expect. When they do, intense com­pet­ition for obvious phrases often puts them out of reach for local busi­nesses and other small firms. Obvious search terms are also mostly used for general research that rarely leads to sales.

So effective keyword research is critical to suc­cessful SEO. Here’s the catch, though — tra­di­tional keyword research assumes you have a fairly big budget. Sure, it filters out the most com­pet­itive and costly phrases, and those that get very few searches. Yet it’s mostly based on stats for paid search ads, and can get quite vague from there.

Small business budgets demand a more precise approach. Like showing you exactly which phrases will get the most traffic, most easily, to each page of your site. Based dir­ectly on your own site’s stats. That is cost-effective, spe­cialist small business keyword research.

Almost any small business can benefit from these cost-effective, flexible digital mar­keting packages. Having evolved from SEO packages for small business in the UK, they are perfect for micro busi­nesses. Sole traders and other firms with under 10 employees tend to need the flex­ib­ility these plans offer to make the most of their mar­keting budgets.

Whilst SEO is remote work, many small firms prefer to work with a local SEO company. So, being based in Newport, South Wales, I tend to work with SMEs in South Wales or Southwest England. That means these digital mar­keting & SEO plans are ideal for you if you’re looking for a small business SEO company near Cardiff, Bristol, Bath, Swansea, Cheltenham, Gloucester or Hereford.

Both — because they are flexible, and local SEO is very similar to national SEO. Link building and on-site search factors are important in both cases. So is content that demon­strates what Google calls “E‑E-A‑T” — expertise, exper­ience, authority and trust.

Still, if you’re a local business serving a well-defined area, a local SEO cam­paign will focus a little more on ranking factors that relate to your loc­ation and repu­tation. Things like dir­ectory cita­tions and reviews help your search rankings for terms that include place names.

Your website is a mar­keting vehicle, and SEO is the accle­rator pedal. The more you press on that pedal, the faster you’ll catch up with yours com­pet­itors, and the more you’ll then pull ahead of them. That will take time — espe­cially if you’re com­peting with well-known brands. It will also take longer with lower investment. So it’s important to pick the most powerful small business SEO package you can afford to sustain.

You’ll get custom, brand-boosting assets and back­links that attract vis­itors and improve your search engine rankings. Still, the real goal is more vis­itors, to make more sales. Few vis­itors will buy straight away, but even those that don’t have value, as they may do so in future.

So every visitor is worth at least what it would have cost to reach them with paid ads. That’s usually over £1 per visitor, and can be much higher. That’s your base ROI — with a good offer, extra sales should take it much higher.

You’re thinking of Google Ads. Paid search ads (aka “PPC”) aren’t SEO, though they can be improved by it. SEO is about ranking well in the “organic” (unpaid) listings. People trust those more, so they drive sales more effectively.

Google Ads can be a quick-fix — if you get the ads and your profit margins right, and spend sums com­parable to these SEO packages. Even then, about a quarter of paid listing clicks are likely to be com­pet­itors trying to waste your budget. Adding man­agement fees to such small ad budgets rarely helps.

So PPC can easily be just a costly exper­iment that it’s hard to quit without immed­ti­ately reducing your site’s traffic. Still, if you want to DIY, be aware that the vendors’ advice will mostly aim to increase, not reduce, your ad spend.

Search Engine Optimisation is far more cost-effective than PPC in the long run.

PPC nor­mally costs £1 to £50 per click. So it’s fast, but costly. It’s also addictive, as cutting the budget dir­ectly reduces traffic and sales. That ongoing cost per­man­ently reduces your margins. Competitors can click your ads just to waste your budget, too. That “click fraud” is sadly common.

Free search engine vis­itors save you that cost. They also attract vis­itors who are act­ively searching for what you sell, and so more likely to buy. The quality and rel­evance of your pages affects pricing in some ad systems, too. So expert SEO ser­vices can also reduce PPC costs.

Small business SEO is a very broad term. Microbusinesses tend to have lower mar­keting budgets than larger “small” firms, but can benefit from dif­ferent SEO strategies. Yet most SEO agencies still try to sell everyone the same set of goals. So these small business SEO packages aim to bridge that gap.

The (Usual) Cost of Small Business SEO Packages

Most UK SEO agencies agree that doing effective SEO is dif­ficult for under £500 per month. That’s very affordable for small firms with more than a few staff. Especially as the return on effective small business SEO usually exceeds its cost.

However, smaller firms and micro­busi­nesses can get results for less. Smaller, easier wins can make far more dif­ference to a small firm than to a large one. They also gradually pos­ition you to target the bigger ones. So small business SEO packages should be tailored to your existing pos­i­tioning. Most aren’t. These are.

Well, these are already cheap SEO packages. I’d love to be able to make them even more affordable, but effective SEO requires more work than you may be assuming. So cheaper SEO packages are gen­erally a waste of money. Investing less achieves less. It’s that simple. Some cheap SEO packages are even dan­gerous.

That said, if done properly, some SEO is better than none. So yes, I can offer a Budget SEO option if you need it.

Looking for cheap seo packages for small busi­nesses in the UK is a mine­field. Chasing pro­fes­sional work at amateur prices plays into the hands of cowboys. Many cheap SEO “experts” are simply moon­lighters who dis­appear without notice. Other cheap SEO ser­vices offer out­dated strategies, or sell weak links in bulk. Such links don’t help, and often risk lasting pen­alties by using Private Blog Networks (PBNs) that break search engine guidelines.

So most cheap SEO ser­vices are a false economy. Search engines prefer quality to quantity — and quality costs. Unless you invest enough to get results, you’ll just waste your entire budget.

Safer Cheap Small Business SEO

The “SEO Plus” small business SEO packages create quality content to earn legit­imate links from genuine, estab­lished sites. Whilst not the cheapest SEO packages around, they aim to be the safest, most cost-effective small business SEO packages in the UK.

Domain Authority (“DA”) grades the com­pet­itive strength of your site, largely based on the quality and number of other sites that link to them. The scale runs from 0 to 100, but isn’t liniear. So higher scores are harder to improve. As a result, most sites have a DA under 10. It takes con­sistent effort to get over 20. Similarly, getting over 30 nor­mally takes years.

Because high DA is hard to fake, links from those sites are strong endorse­ments. So Google trusts them far more than links from sites with lower DA. For instance, a single DA 20 link is worth more than two DA 10 links, and a DA 40 link is worth more than two DA 20s.

A Content Delivery Network (“CDN”) sits between your vis­itors and your site. It’s a network of com­puters that boost your site’s speed and security. Both of those affect small business SEO.

Many factors affect your site’s search engine per­formance. Backlinks are “Off Page SEO”, whilst “On Page SEO” involves editing your site structure and content. Similarly, “Technical SEO” changes your site, but focuses on code quality and server setup. So that often needs lower-level access than DIY website plat­forms provide. Broadly though, “On Site” SEO edits can include:

• Content — “content is king”. So it needs to be rel­evant, well-written, readable and unique
• Site structure — sitemaps, internal links, a “robots.txt” file and canon­ic­alisation all help search engines
• Engagement — how long do vis­itors stay on your site?
• Mobile friend­liness — because most vis­itors now use mobile devices
• Site speed — vis­itors don’t like slow sites. So neither do search engines.
• Image optim­isation — bloated image files and missing “alt” tags undermine SEO
• Structured data — adding “meta tags” and other special code to certain types of data (e.g. addresses)
• Site security — vis­itors and search engines prefer sites with SSL security.
• Code quality — inef­fi­cient coding can hurt your rankings

Whilst getting more vis­itors helps, your site still needs to convert them into cus­tomers. That’s not just down to having a great offer — present­ation matters a lot. There are common pit­falls and best prac­tices, but dif­ferent audi­ences respond to dif­ferent tactics. So Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is where mar­keting, psy­chology and pro­fes­sional web design meet.