Affordable Small Business SEO Packages (2024)

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.

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 relating to your location and reputation. Things like directory citations and reviews help your search rankings for terms that include place names.

SEO is not a quick fix. It normally takes 4+ months to start showing results but can easily take 8 to 12 months or more. That largely depends on your competition -- how far behind them you are, and how actively they are competing.

Also, for any given search term, search engines try to promote relevant, helpful content from consistently trustworthy sources. Their trust cannot be earned quickly -- trying to do so looks untrustworthy. So SEO has to be an ongoing strategy of investing in your site's quality.

Finally, backlinks from other quality sites count as votes for yours -- but getting them takes time, and Google can take weeks to discover them and adjust your site's positioning accordingly. If you just thought of a workaround, don't bother. Google constantly evolves to weed those out and applies manual penalties to sites that try to rig their results.

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.

In several ways. First, you'll get custom, brand-boosting assets and backlinks that attract visitors and improve your search engine rankings. Then, whilst few visitors will buy straight away, even those who don't are still valuable, as they may buy in future.

So every visitor is worth at least what it would cost to reach them with paid ads. That's usually over £1 each, and often much higher. A good offer adds the profit from extra sales to that base ROI -- and visitors gained through SEO tend to be far more likely to buy than those reached through paid ads. That's why SEO is one of the most cost effective ways to promote your small business.

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 immediately 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 affect 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 micro businesses 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 assume. 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 endorsem*nts. 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.

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