WordPress SEO for Sole Traders.

How SEO can help the Sole Trader.

Smaller SEO budgets can still be effective if spent wisely.

If you are a sole trader, you probably wear many different hats already, adding a WordPress SEO expert to that list probably isn’t something you really want to do.

In fact, getting your website live was probably enough of a task, but now you have to consider SEO too; there are simply not enough hours in the day.

Use case for Sole Trader SEO.

You are probably great at a lot of things, but SEO may not be in your skillset.

WordPress SEO is not rocket science, but:

• It takes a long time to learn
• It requires investment in quite a lot of online tools
• It is a collection of a lot of small things that need to be done correctly in order to achieve results
• It can also be a sharp learning curve
• It can take a long time to implement
• You won’t see results immediately

On top of the above, it can also do more harm than good if you do it wrong – but you won’t know this until three months after you do it wrong.

Don’t DIY SEO.

Correcting badly implemented SEO can take an age.

SEO work takes at least three months to show any results at all.

If you do it yourself and do it wrong, it can take three times longer to correct it.

We’ve helped many clients who have tried to implement SEO themselves, and we often find that the first part of our job is then to undo the negative effects of the SEO work.

Broadly speaking, we help with 5 main types of SEO:

• Site Audits
• Technical SEO
• Keyword research
• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO

Get a free website audit

How we can help you with SEO.

For Sole Traders, SEO budgets don’t usually even exist, but we can still help you improve your WordPress site SEO.

The key to successful SEO on a smaller budget is to do it slowly and correctly.

As you may not have the budget for a large end-to-end campaign, we suggest a step-by-step approach spread out over a longer period of time.

Typically, this would follow the structure below:

Month one: £180 ex VAT.

• A Deep Dive Site Audit with full reports and a summary by our team on what needs to be done
• A proposal of the next steps based on your objectives, the keywords you want to rank for and the possibilities of ranking (some keywords are a lot more competitive than others)

Month two: £240 ex VAT (four hours of work)

• Remedial work on your website to fix any issues discovered in the Audits
• A detailed plan of action for the forthcoming months

The following months (starting at £240 per month ex VAT)

• Implementation of the agreed work
• Monthly reports on work done and outcomes achieved
• Full tracking of the keywords with your own access to view the reports

We suggest allowing three months for this process and then reviewing after three months.

So this campaign is going to take five months?

Yes, as there is a smaller budget per month, we simply spread the work over a longer period of time.

Get started

What you will get out of this.

A more targeted campaign focussing on fewer keywords with a higher chance of success.

As you have a smaller budget, we need to keep things focused and effective.

This means that we’ll target the keywords that are more likely to make a positive difference to your business to start with.

As we demonstrate results over the initial five months, we can then review what to do for the months ahead.

SEOs often talk about ‘easy wins’. These are keywords where Google (et al) already has your ranking, but are outside the top ten results.

Where these rankings are niche, it’s easier* to get your content ranking higher.

In any initial campaign, most SEO agencies recommend going after these easier wins as they can make a difference quicker and with less investment.

*Easier is a term in SEO that can rely on a wide range of factors. Note that just because something is easier, it does not always follow that it’s easy.

Things to consider.

SEO is competitive, so it’s important to manage expectations from the start.

If you work in a highly competitive niche, SEO can be an uphill struggle on a smaller budget.

If your niche is less competitive or you have a genuine point of difference, it can be a little easier.

With SEO, it’s important to remember that your return on investment should be measured against your initial investment.

It’s not unusual for brands to spend hundreds of thousands per month on SEO, so you need to consider what you are expecting from it.

It’s not a magic bullet, and it can change over time (results can go both up and down).