SEO – Small Business

You do not need “SEO”. You need to be findable for a handful of things you actually sell.

Most small businesses are sold SEO as a monthly abstraction — a number of keywords, a list of activities, a report. What actually matters is much narrower: when somebody nearby searches for the two or three things you do, does your name come up, and does the page they land on make it easy to call you?

That is a smaller job than the industry usually admits, and it is the job we would rather do properly than pad out.

Where a small budget goes furthest

• A real page per service. The single most common problem we see is one page titled “Services” listing six things. Search engines cannot rank a bullet point. Six honest pages beat one thorough one.
• Your Google Business Profile. For most local businesses this drives more enquiries than the website does, and it is free. Categories, hours, photos, and a habit of asking for reviews.
• Speed and the phone number. Half your visitors are on a phone, on mobile data, possibly outside. If the page takes six seconds and the number is not tappable, ranking better just buys you more people leaving.
• The words your customers use. Not the words your trade uses. People search for “blocked drain”, not “drainage solutions”.
• One thing at a time. A small budget spread across everything does nothing at all. Concentrated on the two searches that actually bring you work, it can pay for itself.

Three things worth hearing before you spend anything

It is slow. Expect months, not weeks, and expect the narrower searches to move first. Anyone promising fast rankings is either doing something that gets undone at the next update, or counting a metric you do not care about.

If you need the phone ringing next week, this is not it. That is advertising. We would rather tell you that than take a retainer for six months while you wait. Often the right answer is ads now and SEO in the background, and we will say so.

Some markets are not worth entering. If three national companies with large budgets own every search in your trade, a small monthly spend will not move you past them, and we will tell you before you start rather than after.

The plans below are a starting point rather than a fixed menu. Tell us what you do and where you do it, and we will come back with a recommendation and an exact price — including if the recommendation is to spend less than you were expecting.