20 reasons retained affordable WordPress SEO services can benefit small business websites.

A website is THE best way to deliver new customers or leads for your business.

A properly optimised website is crucial for the success of any small business.

With the increasing competition in search results, optimising your website for search engines is essential to ensure your business is visible to potential customers.

This is where search engine optimisation (SEO) comes into play, and it doesn’t have to cost a fortune, but it does have to be consistent.

With so much written online about SEO, it’s tempting to go for a DIY approach. Still, by working with an affordable WordPress SEO agency, you can spread the work over a longer period of time to make it affordable and effective.

In this post, we’ll look at why working with an SEO agency can deliver real benefits for your small business.

1. Experience
2. Expertise
3. Time-saving
4. Cost-effective
5. Targeted traffic
6. Increased brand awareness
7. Improved user experience
8. Long-term results
9. Better ROI
10. Competitive edge
11. Improved credibility
12. Increased website traffic
13. Local Search Results
14. Link building
15. Social media optimisation
16. Mobile optimisation
17. Analytics and Reporting
18. Scalability
19. Continuous improvement
20. Improved overall online strategy

Experience.

SEO is not rocket science, but it isn’t straightforward. There are lots of small, sometimes seemingly insignificant things that all come together to create effective SEO.

An experienced SEO agency will have worked on many previous projects, which means they will know about all the techniques that can benefit your business and get more traffic to your website.

Your project will hit the ground running, and you’ll see the benefits of working with an SEO agency demonstrate returns quicker.

Expertise.

This goes hand-in-hand with the point above.

SEO experts know where to start, what to do and how to get the best results for your small business website in the shortest amount of time.

No SEO expert knows the inner workings of search engine algorithms, but they have the expertise to understand what works and what doesn’t and what the best approach for your business website will be.

SEO is far more than keywords, on-page and off-page SEO: it’s also about your business, how it works and what makes a good customer.

SEO expertise also takes in landing pages, conversion rates (and optimising them), forms, CRMs and a wide range of other elements to support your SEO campaigns.

It’s not just about increasing the average position of your keywords.

Time-saving.

Is doing SEO the best use of your time? If you’re running a business, time is best spent running the company, and while SEO may fall into this category, you’ve also got to take the time to learn how to do SEO correctly.

An important thing to remember with SEO is that it can take a few hours to do it wrong, but once done, it can take months to put it right.

This is why outsourcing your SEO to an agency will save you time and avoid doing it wrong.

Cost-effective.

Well-planned SEO should equal more new business to the point where it pays for itself.

A small SEO retainer with a WordPress SEO agency that knows what it’s doing won’t be a cost; it will be an investment that delivers a return.

The most important thing that makes SEO cost-effective is the project’s planning stages, where the agency’s experience and expertise come into play again.

Experience will equal effectiveness, which by default, makes an experienced SEO agency cost-effective.

Targeted traffic

Getting more traffic to your site is essential, but it has to be the right traffic.

You can use keyword research to find the keywords you should target with your site.

As a general rule of thumb:

• Shorter keywords (e.g. Trainers) are harder to rank for but generally have many more searches per month
• Longer keywords (e.g. Waterproof vegan Trainers) are easier to rank for but generally have fewer searches per month

Spending time researching these, using free tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, you will be able to find keywords suitable for your own business.

Getting more targeted traffic to your website, which means that people genuinely search for your product or service, will increase conversions and lead to new customers.

Increased brand awareness.

SEO is one way to increase your brand awareness by appearing in the search more often so more and more people engage with your brand.

Another spin-off of doing SEO is sharing the content you regularly produce for SEO on Social Media.

If you are a B2C business, then Instagram, Facebook and Twitter will be the place to do this.

For B2B businesses, LinkedIn is probably the best place to share your content.

By producing authoritative, expert and informative content for your site, you then get a very cost-effective way of building your brand awareness, which ultimately drives more site traffic and creates more customers.

Improved user experience.

Part of any SEO project is to look at how easy your site is to use.

The easier your site is to use, the more people will use it and find the information and answers they need.

This is, again, something that leads directly to new customers.

It’s important to remember that UX does not just design; it’s about ensuring your site can be used easily.

This often means making your site more straightforward and not over-designing it.

A UX review of a site needs data, so you will need a certain number of visitors per month to make UX decisions.

Long-term results.

Great content on your website can give you long-term results.

A well-written piece of content can often achieve ‘evergreen content’.

This type of content remains relevant over time and therefore ranks well for a more extended period of time.

Taking the time to plan and produce content designed to be evergreen in nature can deliver lead after lead.

If you compare this to something like press advertising, it’s precious.

A press ad in a magazine might cost £500 to design and £750 every time it appears in the publication.

There’s a standard rule that adverts must appear in publications at least seven times before being noticed or actioned upon.

That’s a cost of at least £5,500 even to gain conversions, and once the advert stops, so do the new business enquiries.

Getting longer-term results from your SEO can get you new business as soon as you start ranking, and evergreen content stays there and can do for many months.

So how come if you told someone their next blog post or landing page should require over £5,000 to create, they would think you were mad?

Getting long-term results from SEO does require investment, but the return on this can be enormous.

Better ROI.

As we’ve mentioned in the point above, the levels of ROI that SEO can achieve can be massive.

You can invest in a video and a white paper for your content, or you can spend the time researching and writing something that is the best content on the internet about the keyword or phrase.

This might not cost as much as the £5,000 mentioned above, but if you achieve this, the returns are enormous.

For example, our sister company, Toast, ranks for Annual Report Designers.

In the last three years, this has delivered thousands of leads, resulting in the opportunity to quote on hundreds of thousands of projects and ultimately win over £100,000 of new business.

That’s one page on the site ranking for one keyword. The ROI on this single page is over 1150%.

Competitive edge.

This considerable benefit is delivered when you get your retained SEO correct.

SEO can sometimes level the playground between small and huge companies in advertising and marketing.

While a mega-corp can throw thousands of pounds at Google Ads, what appears in the organic results is down to Google’s algorithm.

This means that a small business with the knowledge and expertise can, in theory, out-rank a company ten times the size if they invest in a retained SEO campaign that gets its content ranking.

This is not a battle of budgets. It’s a battle of authority, knowledge and expertise and the ability to translate this into content that the search engines will rank above all others.

If a potential customer searches for something, and your small business outranks the competition on every exact and broad-match result, you own that space on the internet.

Clients often miss this when considering SEO campaigns: it can make you more visible, well-known and successful than your most significant competitor.

Improved credibility.

Ranking high in the search for lots of keywords and phrases associated with your product or service can increase the credibility of your business.

Suppose people search for things you offer with keyword modifiers around the ‘expert’ phrase and consistently find your content. In that case, it will follow that these potential customers will perceive your business as an expert in the niche they are searching.

So SEO campaigns that are based around helpful and knowledgable content will not only improve your rankings, they will enhance your credibility and make you the go-to company in your sector.

This is most true for organic SEO rather than adverts, people internet users know that advert placement can be bought – if you have enough money, you can pay for the top spot.

People know you’ve bought the positions, whereas, with organic SEO, you’ve earned the positions. It’s a subtle but significant difference.

Increased website traffic (the right kind).

This is the most obvious benefit of better SEO, but it’s further down this list as you don’t simply want more website traffic; you want more of the right website traffic.

Many SEO companies will focus on the increase in traffic they generate to your website.

But if this traffic is not relevant to your services, it will bounce, and over time, this can mean that your ranking drop.

Google’s recent Helpful Content Update was designed to deal with this.

Many sites, such as those that display adverts all over the place, want high traffic in the hope people view or click on adverts.

Your site wants more traffic so they will engage with your stuff, spend longer on it, and ultimately contact you.

Local search results.

Retained, affordable WordPress SEO services can help optimize your website for local search, ensuring potential local customers are finding you.

‘Near me’ searches are everywhere now on mobile, so investing in the local aspects of SEO is essential.

It’s a balancing act, as many companies work locally, regionally, nationally and internationally, so you don’t just want to rank for local search results if you work with clients everywhere.

Conversely, if you are a local business whose customers are within a 15-mile range of your business, then local SEO should be the primary focus of any campaign.

Link building.

Having great content on your site encourages natural links back to your website.

If you invest in creating authoritative content for your site, people will find it when looking for references or content to link back to from their websites.

It’s commonly understood that every webpage should reference at least one external site to support their writing.

This effectively is a ‘vote’ for your website from other websites, citing it as an authority on the niche, and this can help your site rank higher for your own keywords and phrases.

Many SEOs will buy backlinks, and while this is common across SEO agencies, focusing on the content that will organically get its own backlinks is far more critical.

Social media optimisation.

As well as sharing your content on Social Media platforms, a smaller part of an SEO campaign can be optimising your Social Channels to drive more traffic to your site.

This can include:

• Improving how they look
• Designing professional images, icons and banners
• Planning a calendar for SMM, so it’s done correctly
• Posting in a consistent and on-brand way

Mobile optimisation.

There’s a very good chance that Google is already indexing your website mobile-first.

This means that part of its ranking algorithm considers how fast and accessible your website is on mobile devices (even if most of your customers are desktop-based.

This is covered in the technical SEO that any SEO agency should do on your site: making sure it’s as fast as it can be on mobile devices.

Doing so will increase your chance of ranking well on mobile searches and benefit your desktop results, bringing your more website visitors across all devices.

Analytics and reporting.

SEO is nothing without clear and transparent reporting on how many visitors your website is getting.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool, but it’s not enough, as you want to know about the keywords and phrases that increase your site’s traffic.

Tools like SEM Rush, ahrefs, and SE Ranking will also give you more transparency on where you are ranking and for what.

A good SEO campaign will include this sort of reporting.

Scalability.

SEO needs to scale as your investment in it changes over time.

As SEO starts to generate more targeted customers for your website, you may choose to invest more into it, so you need an agency that can scale with you.

Likewise, if you want to pause a campaign for whatever reason, your SEO experts need to be able to handle this.

A flexible and scalable (in both directions) SEO service will give you the best options when working on SEO.

Continuous improvement.

As with all things SEO, it’s not set and forget.

There’s a common saying regarding SEO:

Previous performance is not a guarantee of future success.

As everything digital changes at a fantastic rate, what worked last year may not work next year.

It’s also true that your visitors are also in a constant state of flux, so you need to make sure that your SEO is on top of this to maintain the number of visitors you get to your website.

Having a retained SEO agency means that they will understand your business, have worked with you and will help to plan for future events that may impact your website traffic.

Improved overall online strategy.

SEO is far greater than the sum of its parts, so appropriately implemented over time, it will improve all your online efforts, from your blogging to Social Media. It will positively impact your website traffic, increasing the numbers.

The key to consistency is to get your SEO work done on a retained basis with the agency or SEO freelancer you work with.

This will ensure that you post great content regularly and that everything, from your optimisation to your internal links, is done to maximise the right traffic to your website.

Retained and affordable WordPress SEO services will provide small businesses with a cost-effective and tailored solution to improve their online presence and attract more of the right customers.

Optimising your website for search engines using the techniques above can drive targeted traffic, increase brand awareness, improve your credibility and realise many other benefits that you may have thought were not an outcome of SEO work.