What Are the Types of Affordable SEO Services for Small Businesses?
Article by Colette Nichol, Story Strategist, SEO Expert, and Solo Filmmaker
The most affordable SEO services for small businesses are keyword research and content strategy planning.
If you’re a local business, getting help with local SEO is an affordable option that should result in more traffic to your business. If you’re a small company with a global audience, the most affordable SEO service will be a pillar page strategy.
On the flip side, the most expensive SEO services are premium evergreen SEO-based videos, content writing, and copyediting.
The more specialized the labour required to execute an SEO plan, the more expensive it becomes. However, in my opinion, SEO shouldn’t be looked at through this lens. It should be viewed as an investment that provides positive or negative ROI.
You need to speak with an ethical organic SEO consultant who can give you a clear picture of the traffic potential for your business based on your niche.
If a $2000/month SEO plan helps you make $10,000 in additional sales, you might not consider it expensive.
Table of Contents
- Choosing the Right SEO Company With a Limited Budget
- Cost and Value of SEO for Small Businesses
- Affordable vs. Cheap SEO Services
- Benefits of Affordable SEO Services for Small Businesses
- Blogging for SEO
- Best Practices for Local SEO
- Why Should Small Businesses Invest in SEO?
- Do Affordable SEO Services Really Exist?
- Work with an SEO Consultant and Expert
- Common Questions about Affordable SEO Services
Choosing the Right SEO Company With a Limited Budget
Finding the right SEO company can be difficult when you have a limited budget.
If you’re just interested in local SEO, then you’ll want to compare the services of small local SEO companies to those of a big company in the Philippines or the USA.
But if your business has the potential to convert national and international traffic into customers, then you’ll want to find someone who you trust to create a comprehensive strategy for you. You’ll also likely need help to execute the strategy. Usually, SEO is a long-term “forever” strategy.
Unless you want to become an SEO expert yourself, you can think of your SEO consultant as being similar to your financial advisor.
As long as the relationship is going well, you keep working with them. So part of finding the right SEO company is making sure that you’re going to enjoy working with these people long-term.
If you have a global audience, there’s usually no limit to how much traffic your website can draw.
Meaning you can ALWAYS keep growing.
If you want to bring your SEO in-house, your SEO consultant can train your team for you and provide the big-picture strategy yearly or quarterly.
🌟Related Post: What Is an SEO Consultant and Why Are They Important?
Cost and Value of SEO for Small Businesses
The cost of your SEO contract should be less than the potential value your business can extract from your SEO efforts.
Make sure you do an ROI analysis before you start doing SEO marketing for your small business. In many cases, SEO will help your business grow A LOT. But that’s not the case for every single business.
Affordable vs. Cheap SEO Services
I would be wary of any SEO services that seem excessively cheap.
If someone says they can get you tons of organic traffic for $200 per month, that’s cheap. And also highly unlikely. Just like any business, doing good SEO has costs associated with it. So cheap SEO means that corners are being cut somewhere. You don’t want bad SEO to come back and haunt you.
🌟Related Post: Working with an Organic SEO Consultant to Boost Organic Traffic
Benefits of Affordable SEO Services for Small Businesses
The main benefit of getting SEO done for your company is that it will help you grow.
You’ll increase website traffic, and as long as your website converts, this will result in more sales. However, SEO has other benefits. It typically speeds up the sales process and makes running your business more predictable because your leads are more predictable.
Blogging for SEO
SEO isn’t a magic trick.
Most SEO plans are based on content creation. The Google bots crawling your website read words. So if there aren’t any words on your pages, you won’t get much traffic. To increase traffic, you need content that’s helpful and full of the authority signals that Google’s algorithm considers relevant.
In most cases, a good SEO strategy involves creating a pillar page strategy.
This involves having some massively comprehensive website pages which are supported by smaller blog posts. (2)
Best Practices for Local SEO
1. GMB
- Claim and verify your Google My Business (GMB) listing.
- Make sure all the info on your GMB listing is correct.
- Include your business’s most important keywords on your GMB listing.
- Include high-quality photos on your GMB listing.
- If you have multiple business locations, you should make sure you add all those locations to your GMB listing. (3)
- Monitor Google reviews and respond to them, whether good or bad. (4)
2. Keywords
- Use location-specific keywords on your website. This includes your state, province, region, city, and nearby big cities.
- Add location-specific keywords in context to your “About” page.
- When using location-specific keywords, include them in your H1, H2 and H3 headings.
- Also include keywords in alt tags, your site title, and your meta description.
3. Website Pages
- If you have multiple business locations in various cities, have a page for each of those cities.
- Create website pages that discuss your services in the context of your region using location-specific keywords.
- If you’re struggling to reach the top of Google, you may need to create 3-4 pages about your key geographic area. Then you may need to create 3-4 pages that are just about the services that you offer. Link these to your main pages.
4. Videos
- If you have trouble ranking, make a short video about your services in the context of your region. Do one video for each important website page.
5. Mobile
- Optimize your website for mobile since many people are doing local searches on their phones.
6. Citations
- Build local citations and ensure that the business information is correct across these local citations. A local citation is a listing on a local website.
7. Backlinks
- Get backlinks from local businesses and websites.
Why Should Small Businesses Invest in SEO?
You should only invest in SEO as a small business owner if you know there’s potential in your niche.
If you’ve run the numbers and can see enough search volume in your niche for significant gains, then you should do SEO because it’ll grow your business.
There’s only one reason to do SEO: increased sales and revenue.
Do Affordable SEO Services Really Exist?
Affordable SEO services do exist.
You need to know the potential ROI for your business and have a starting budget that your business can afford. Then do your research and find an SEO consultant or agency who can help you. If you’re trying to lower costs, you may need to do some or all of the implementation yourself. You can pay to have a strategy created for you, but then you can do the writing and posting.
That said, it’s important that all your posts and pages are SEO optimized correctly.
You won’t get good results if you don’t know how to write URLs, site titles, and H2 titles correctly. You also won’t get good results if you don’t know how to interlink your pages correctly.
And finally, if your home page isn’t set up properly, you won’t get great results.
So while it’s important that your business only pays for a service it can afford, you also don’t want to cut corners and put time into something that doesn’t work because it’s not being done properly.
Work with an SEO Consultant and Expert
If you’d like to work with an SEO Consultant to grow your business and increase traffic to your website, please get in touch.
I work with a few small businesses every year. We take on a max of one new client per month, so schedule a call at least a few months before your ideal start date, as there’s usually a waitlist.
Common Questions about Affordable SEO Services
How much should a small business pay for SEO?
A small business should pay anywhere from $1000 per month to $10,000 or more monthly for SEO.
Since the definition of small business can include five, six, seven, and eight-figure businesses, there’s no cut-and-dry answer to this question. However, if you’re sitting on a lucrative niche with a ton of potential, I would recommend allocating a large portion of your marketing budget to SEO.
Is SEO worth it for small businesses?
SEO is definitely worth it for small businesses.
Small businesses can easily compete in the SEO game because there are fewer stakeholders preventing them from making great content.
In addition, many niches online are underserved. You should do the research and find out what the landscape for your niche looks like online and whether you’re sitting on an SEO goldmine.
What is a good SEO budget?
A great SEO budget is $5000 to $7000 per month.
With that size of investment, you can get fantastic results. If you’re spending over $5000, you should do online videos as part of your SEO strategy. This will help boost your results dramatically.
However, smaller businesses in lower competition niches can still get good results with a $1000 to $3000 per month investment.
How can I get more business through my website?
First, you need to get the right traffic to your website.
Then you need to make sure that traffic converts. You should focus on getting your visitors to take action. Find out what the typical conversion rate for a website in your industry is and try to reach that rate. Then brainstorm how you can improve even further.
Conversion optimization is a big topic.
But it’s important to work on your conversions when you’re doing SEO so you don’t waste the traffic.
Why do small businesses need SEO services?
Small businesses are typically trying to grow but don’t have massive marketing budgets.
You probably don’t have a budget that allows you to advertise on television. SEO allows you to get found by people who are actually searching for your products and services. Fun fact: when people are SEARCHING for you or your products, they are far more likely to buy.
SEO is typically going to provide better ROI than social media ads because you’re not interrupting the user.
You’re showing up when they’re trying to find you. If you want to grow past word of mouth and without relying heavily on social media ads, you probably need SEO.
How long will it take to see results?
How long it takes to see results depends on your foundation and the problems your website might be facing.
If you have zero content and you’re a new website, it could take 6 to 8 months to see real improvements.
If your site has plenty of content but is not well-optimized, it may take 3 to 6 months. Usually, it takes 1 to 6 months to see results after any kind of SEO has been done.
What SEO services do small businesses need?
Most businesses need a pillar page strategy and an SEO-optimized home page.
If you’re a local business, then you also need a local SEO strategy.
Summary of Key Points:
- Compare SEO companies based on your business needs and budget.
- Consider the long-term relationship with the SEO company and weigh the cost against the potential value for your business.
- Avoid cheap SEO services as they may result in poor quality work.
- SEO helps increase website traffic and makes running your business more predictable.
- Creating helpful content is the backbone of most good SEO strategies.
- Affordable SEO services exist, but you must execute any strategy correctly if you want to achieve good results.
- Working with an SEO consultant can help small businesses increase website traffic.
- Most small businesses need a pillar page strategy and an SEO-optimized home page.
- A local SEO strategy is a safe bet if you’re a small local business.
- Small businesses should invest in SEO if there is potential in their niche to increase sales and revenue.
SEO Articles and Guides
If you’re considering doing SEO, these articles and guides will help you decide whether to move forward with expert help or DIY.
What Are Some Good Objectives When Hiring SEO Consultants?
Increase Targeted Organic Traffic to Your Website with SEO
Quick Guide to SEO Marketing for Small Businesses
SEO Consultant
If you’re a business owner and want to work with an SEO consultant and expert, please schedule a 15-minute call with me.
The link to schedule the call is below. I work with local and global businesses that are in a growth cycle and want to increase their traffic. If you’re already spending money on advertising, but you’re not maximizing your online strategy with SEO, then you’re missing out on a major source of revenue.
There’s no better traffic than the people who are already looking to have their problems solved.
In most cases, SEO traffic beats all other forms of traffic and tends to have the highest ROI of all forms of online marketing.
SEO & Video Production Vancouver + Worldwide
Hi, I’m Colette Nichol! I’m a video producer, story strategist, and SEO expert based out of Vancouver.
Whether you’re based in Vancouver or the middle of the Arctic circle, I can help you get found online. As an SEO consultant and video producer, I typically work with clients who are experts in their field and want to reach a larger national or international audience and increase business revenue. If you’re open to combining high-end evergreen videos with traditional on-page SEO and a content strategy, you can expect to see massive results. I’d love to hear about your business goals to see if working together might be a fit.
Get in touch HERE to schedule a 15-minute introductory call.
About the Author
Hi! I’m Colette Nichol. I’m a solo filmmaker, SEO, story strategist, and digital marketer based out of rainy Vancouver, Canada. I’ve been helping small local businesses and global brands since 2014.
In 2017, I started applying SEO to my work with clients and in my own business. The results were extraordinary, and I got obsessed!
If you’re interested in working together, please reach out. I’d love to hear about your business goals to see if we can help.
We currently take on a maximum of one new client per month and are typically booked 3-months in advance, so please reach out early.
Resources:
www.blog.hubspot.com/marketing/blog-search-engine-optimization
www.ahrefs.com/blog/local-seo/
www.myzeller.com/blog/the-right-way-to-manage-multiple-locations-on-google-my-business
