Affordable SEO Services for Small Business: Our Guide
Here at DASH-SEO, we enjoy helping small businesses transform into big businesses with the help of our excellent digital marketing strategies. SEO is our specialty and we strive to provide all of our valued clients, and potential clients, with the SEO services they’d expect from an established SEO agency as ourselves. “Affordable” is subjective, so we’ll be examining just how important it truly is to treat SEO as long-term investment, and not as a one-stop, overnight implementation. Read on to learn more about the associated value of SEO and why here at DASH-SEO, we always place a strong value on providing quality services within a well-defined budget catered to your growing business.
Define “Affordable”
Your version of “affordable” may be a lot different than the “affordable” your neighboring business expects to see on an invoice. If your margins are tight and you’re expecting a number of high-volume purchases overnight, SEO is most likely not for your business model (PPC is the right choice in that situation). If your product nets you a substantial profit every time a conversion takes place, you may not bat an eye at a $2,500/month retainer, while a business owner in a different niche where the profit derived from a number of sales is not even close to the monthly retainer of $2,500 may cringe at such a rate. For this reason, it’s important to define your version of affordable versus another company’s version of affordable. If your budget is not in line with a particular agency you’d like to work with, you may want to look elsewhere and possibly choose to implement the SEO strategy yourself or in-house with a dedicated staff member who knows the basics. After you’ve established some decent gains in the first few months, revisit with the agency and see if they can take a look at your progress. They may be able to then point out what and where the issues exist and present a proposal to fix said issues on a monthly retainer basis. Quality SEO is actually quite affordable for many businesses, even small businesses. At a rate of $2,500/month, you won’t have to worry about payroll tax, insurance, office space, computer equipment, software, etc… You’ll only have to focus on the results, the monthly reports, and the overall ROI from your investment. This ends up providing a situation where it’s ultimately much more affordable to hire an SEO agency at a rate of $2,500/month compared to a full-time SEO specialist who will be anywhere from $35,000 – $70,000 per year depending on your business’ location, their experience, and the level of work involved.
Define Your Budget
Defining your budget ad the allocation towards SEO is something which can exponentially accelerate the process of implementation, the expectations of efforts, and the overall results to be had. If you’re only working with a relatively small budget, it may be best to save up and see what a quality SEO agency can do for you based on past experience, client reviews, and case studies. Yes, a $2,500/month investment for a minimum of three months (the SEO industry’s retainer average) may seem to be a lot of money to a small business initially, yet when you begin to see the sales and conversions roll in, that $2,500/month will be a drop in the bucket in retrospect.
Have Realistic Goals
When you and your SEO agency you’re working with set realistic goals from the start, everyone will be happier. Avoid SEO agencies who promise overnight ranking improvements and also steer clear of agencies who work on a “number of keywords per month” basis. These agencies typically operate on a quick in, quick out basis where their client retention rate is low due to over-promising and under-delivering. Focus on working with an agency who provides quality results at a steady pace over multiple months and you’ll have long-lasting, profitable rankings which will prove to be well worth the investment of both time and money.
“You Get What You Pay For”
If you go searching for cheap SEO, you’ll find cheap SEO. Cheap SEO yields cheap results which may even have you end up in Google’s penalty box with a manual penalty imposed on your site if the cheap SEO agency decides to engage in blackhat practices. Nobody wants to deal with this, so it’s best to avoid cheap SEO agencies altogether as they most likely recycle content between clients (Google hates duplicate content), they’ll buy links from low domain authority sites, and barely clean up your on-site SEO. All in all, SEO is often best compared to life’s daily purchases, the cheaper it is, the more likely it is to break, taste bad, or end up costing you more money. Make the right choice and choose quality over quantity.
Treating SEO as a True Investment in Your Business
Whenever you invest money into a service or product, you expect some type of return on investment. This ROI can be anything from additional profit, to brand awareness, to just plain happiness. Whichever you’re after, excellent SEO campaigns will be able to provide all of the aforementioned expected returns when you treat SEO as a real investment.
Growing Your Business from “Small” to “Big”
At DASH-SEO, we’ve helped many small businesses make the leap from their initial standing, to a medium-sized business, to a bug business; all within a relatively standard timeframe (6 months to 1 year). Do you want to see similar results? Feel free to submit your site below for a complimentary SEO audit and we’ll be sure to have it back to you within 24 hours. We look forward to hearing from you soon and can’t wait to transform your small business into a big business as soon as possible.