SEO Packages For Small Business

Whilst small firms often try to “save” money by advert­ising less, that false economy can be dis­astrous. Because mar­keting drives sales, cutting mar­keting loses sales. That often costs more than it “saves”. So you need cost-effective mar­keting.

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 you can fine-tune it as you go along
• Reaches cus­tomers inter­na­tionally, 24/7/365, when they are most inter­ested in buying

Recommended Marketing Budgets

The recom­mended mar­keting budget for business growth is around 10% of turnover. So UK gov­ernment data for various sizes of UK SME in early 2019 sug­gests these average mar­keting budget targets:

• No employees: £500 per month
• 1 – 9 employees: £4,200 per month
• 10 – 49 employees: £25,000 per month
• 50 – 249 employees: £150,000 per month

However, spending much less than 5% usually leads to slow business decline. In fact, large firms often spend 12% to 20% of revenue on mar­keting — and that’s what you’re up against.

Your com­pet­itors are investing in digital mar­keting, so can you really afford not to?

These are called “SEO Plus packages” because they offer far more than other small business SEO packages. They can even help with pay-per-click ads too, at the “Standard” level and above. That’s because PPC and SEO are both great ways to get traffic to your website. Still, Search Engine Optim­isation is more cost-effective than PPC in the long run.

Most paid digital ads charge from 50p to £50 per click, with £1 being fairly typical. So that’s the market value of each visitor delivered to your site. However, paid ads are an ongoing cost. So they reduce your margins. They also tend to be addictive — if you stop the ads, you reduce your sales.

Free search engine vis­itors save you that cost. SEO invests in quality to attract vis­itors, so expert SEO keeps working for you long after you stop spending on it.

Almost any business can benefit from these cost-effective, flexible digital mar­keting packages. Still, they evolved from SEO packages for small business that were designed to help SMES in the UK*. So if you’re a small business in the UK, these digital mar­keting & SEO plans are for you. If you aren’t in the UK, but are still inter­ested, let me know.

* Espe­cially if you need an SEO company in South Wales or Southwest Engiand (i.e. near Cardiff, Newport, Bristol, Bath, Swansea, Chel­tenham, Gloucester or Hereford). I work remotely though, so if you’re further afield, that’s fine.

Whilst business web­sites have meas­urable goals, DIY web design leaves achieving goals to chance — and usually fails. By com­parison, pro­fes­sional web designers see a lot of website stats. So we know which fea­tures tend to increase con­version rates, and can adjust sites to achieve that. That’s “Con­version Rate Optim­isation”, or “CRO”.

Now, con­sider these points:

• Mar­keting drives revenue. That requires investment, though (see “Why do I need digital mar­keting?”, above).
• Most web­sites, espe­cially DIY web­sites and cut-price sites, convert less than 1% of their vis­itors to cus­tomers. Only highly optimised sites with tar­geted mar­keting get to 10% or more.
• So getting cus­tomers to your website is vital, but costs £1 or more per visitor by paid ads, or less by investing in SEO.
• Doubling your con­version rate halves your mar­keting cost per sale, making your mar­keting budget go further. The lower your current con­version rate, the easier it may be to improve too, as some pretty fun­da­mental mis­takes are common.

That is why you need Con­version Rate Optim­isation (CRO).

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. That will return you to a short form. Just com­plete that, and I’ll have enough to start.

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

SEO packages — illus­trating non-linear power increases

Your website is a mar­keting vehicle, so these SEO plans are engines. Mean­while, your target market and com­pet­ition define the road con­di­tions.

To clarify, Domain Authority (DA) is like engine power, but it grows expo­nen­tially. For instance, one DA 30 link can be twice as powerful as a DA 20 link. That means each plan adds a lot to the one below it. Likewise, the other com­ponents get more effective on larger plans, too.

Still, if you’re a boot­strapped (self-funded) sole trader or other micro­business in your first year of trading, start with the Starter plan. That can work for low com­pet­ition niches in local SEO target markets, too.

Oth­erwise, you’ll want the best small business SEO “engine” you can afford. That’s espe­cially true if you’re com­peting with well known brands.

Whilst these are intended as cheap SEO packages for UK small busi­nesses, there’s a limit on what can be done for under £5 a day. Still, I can offer some per­spective, and a few sug­ges­tions.

First, it’s worth noting that most decent UK SEO agencies will tell you that effective SEO is dif­ficult or impossible for under £500 per month. That’s broadly true for the goals of estab­lished small busi­nesses in most markets. However, micro­busi­nesses (under 10 employees) and startups tend to have slightly more achievable goals. Still, you do need to know what you’re doing.

Sadly though, many cheap SEO “experts” are moon­lighting and can dis­appear without notice. Others offer inflexible plans that don’t keep up with current SEO best prac­tices. For instance, they may do keyword research, but typ­ically only once. However, that research needs to be ongoing, as ideal target keywords evolve over time.

So don’t waste your money on cheap SEO ser­vices that sell links in bulk. They are a false economy. Whilst weak (under DA10+) links are easy to get, they won’t help. That’s why my “SEO Plus” small business SEO packages build links with Domain Authority of 20 or more.

Some cheap SEO ser­vices provide these links by com­menting on forums. Others use Private Blog Net­works (PBNs). These tricks are out­dated, breaking search engine guidelines and poten­tially attracting pen­alties. These days, search engines prefer quality to quantity — and buying links is right out. Whilst com­mis­sioning quality content for other sites takes more work, it earns a legit­imate citation.

So how can you improve SEO on a budget? By reg­u­larly pub­lishing quality content on your site. That takes time, though — and pro­fes­sional writing skills. So check out my content mar­keting ser­vices, which start at just £75 per month.

Google retired Page Rank in 2013, so third-party sites now measure site and page quality. Domain Authority (“DA”) is the most direct replacement. It scores sites from 0 to 100, based on how trust­worthy they seem. The best measure of that is the quality and number of other sites that link to them.

However, like Page Rank, DA isn’t a linear scale. The higher it gets, the harder it is to improve. So most sites have a DA under 10, and getting over 20 takes con­sistent effort over time. Getting over 30 takes a lot more.

Because a high DA is very hard to fake, links from those sites are powerful endorse­ments. So Google trusts them far more than links from sites with lower DA. Still, that also means it’s harder to get links from such sites, as they require higher standards from their con­trib­utors.

Whilst quality back­links make a big dif­ference, many other factors affect your site’s search engine per­formance. Those that can be fixed by direct edits to your site are called “On Page SEO” factors, or “Tech­nical SEO”. 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
• Image optim­isation — bloated image files and missing “alt” tags can easily undermine SEO
• Content — “content is king”. So is it rel­evant, well-written, well-struc­tured, readable and unique?
• Struc­tured data — adding “meta tags” and other special code to certain types of data (e.g. addresses)
• Site structure — sitemaps, internal links, a “robots.txt” file and canon­ic­alisation all help 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 will vary within limits that you set, so a minimum ad budget of £40 per month is recom­mended. Ad budgets over £1,500 per month will need extra man­agement, so please contact me for prices at that point.

That’s flexible. Whilst some ser­vices imply that 50 target keywords are better than 10, it’s not really that simple.

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

Overall site quality also affects SEO. So improving that helps rankings for rel­evant phrases 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 link-building 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, how com­pet­itive your market is, and how you measure results. The content these SEO plans create will be visible straight away. How long they take to affect your bottom line can vary, though.

Notably, the common “last touch” way of meas­uring mar­keting is mis­leading because it only credits sales to the last thing viewed. That ignores all the other mar­keting that built trust to get the sale. So, you need to track the right metrics to get a clearer picture — 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.: SEO is about affecting long-term traffic trends. Because of this, it takes time — often 6 months or more. So a three month minimum term applies to these SEO packages. After that, you can cancel at any time 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.