12 Best Affordable SEO Services for Small Business in 2024
The Glorious Company Team
If you’re a small business, chances are you’re looking for affordable SEO services. This has always been the case but is particularly true these days, as the cost of inflation eats up your business profit margins faster than ever. Where can you turn for affordable, though not cheap, SEO that delivers?
SEO (search engine optimization) is still one of the most vital strategies you need to master to ensure your website and blog get ranked on Google and that you’re easily found by your customers and target audience alike. This is especially applicable for small businesses, which don’t have much brand recognition to begin with or a big enough marketing budget for numerous channels.
SEO is tailor-made for small businesses since it’s a cost-effective tactic to reach your customers and sell your products or services online.
Let’s take an in-depth look at how small business can get ahead with SEO.
Should Small Businesses Invest in SEO?
The short answer is yes: Small businesses should absolutely invest in SEO, especially if you’re an online-only store. Even if you’re a brick-and-mortar operation, there are many benefits to be gained by investing in SEO and expanding online.
For starters, the internet is a vast space, and your website is only one of millions and millions. With competition this fierce in your industry, you need to make it easier for your target audience to find you via organic search, for queries and questions that they’re already searching for. That’s the role of SEO.
SEO does this by:
Surfacing your website’s content higher up in Google search rankings
Driving more organic traffic to your website
Establishing you as a thought leader or authority in your niche
According to Terakeet, SEO ROI ranges between 5x and 12.2x. SEO also generates higher traffic than social media marketing (by a factor of 10x) and PPC (by 5x). In other words, SEO packs quite the punch based on the value it delivers, while not costing you an arm and a leg like other marketing tactics.
According to web strategist Wes McDowell, SEO is the best way to advertise your small business on the internet.
Wes McDowell talks SEO strategies in 2024.
If you haven’t yet implemented SEO strategies in your small business, then you’re falling behind your competitors and robbing yourself of chances to attract more customers and expand. To help you out, we’ve got an authoritative list and walkthrough of the top-tier strategies you can easily start doing right now to turn things around.
12 Affordable SEO Services to Get You Started
There are many SEO services to choose from, but don’t get a case of choice paralysis in figuring out which one works the best for you. Here are 12 surefire ways you can make search engine optimization work for your small business—right away.
1. Link Building
Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. These hyperlinks, also known as backlinks, play a significant role in search engine optimization (SEO) for small businesses.
Search engines like Google consider backlinks as a vote of confidence for your website. When a reputable website links to yours, it indicates to search engines that your content is valuable and trustworthy. Consequently, this can improve your website's visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) and drive organic traffic.
For small businesses, link building is essential. It helps increase your website's domain authority, which is a metric that search engines use to evaluate the credibility and relevance of a website. Higher domain authority leads to higher search rankings and more visibility, making it easier for potential customers to find your business online.
Link building can boost referral traffic to your website. When users come across a backlink to your business on another website, they are likely to click on it, leading to increased website visits. This not only improves your online visibility but also presents opportunities for potential customers to engage with your products or services.
Additionally, link building can also enhance your online reputation. When reliable and authoritative websites link to your content, it builds trust with your target audience and establishes you as an expert in your industry. This can positively impact your brand image and contribute to increased customer loyalty.
Backlinks form a core part of Google’s ranking factors, based on data compiled by Brian Dean. While link building is certainly vital to your website climbing up the SERP rankings, Google itself has downplayed their importance somewhat, saying links aren’t a top three ranking factor anymore. The point is that link building shouldn’t be the only goal you focus on, but it is a core aspect of your well-rounded SEO strategy.
2. Guest Posting
Guest posting is a brand awareness tactic based on sharing your expertise with the audiences and readerships of niche websites. You do this by writing a guest post, which is an article that discusses in-depth an area related to your small business, for which you have great expertise.
You generally won’t get paid for a guest post, but the payoff is the level of sheer exposure you’ll enjoy when you are published on a website that has a lot of traffic. The beauty of guest posting is that you’ll also get a backlink to your website or blog, either within the body copy or in a separate author bio, usually at the bottom of the post. So it’s really a one-two punch of raising your brand awareness.
Guest posts won’t just fall into your lap, though, unfortunately. You’ll have to go out into the internet and find those opportunities yourself.
Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how to do this.
Research websites and blogs in your niche to see if they accept guest posts, in the first place. You can achieve this by using what’s known as Google search operators. Specifically, you should use search operators that help you quickly find guest-posting opportunities on the internet.
According to Semrush, there are several commands you can use:
Your keyword intitle:“write for us”
Your keyword intitle:“become an author”
Your keyword intitle:”contribute”
Your keyword intitle:“guest article”
Your keyword intitle:“submit a post”
Your keyword intitle:“submit an article”
Once you’ve narrowed down a site or found one that you think is a good candidate, analyze its current organic traffic and authority score or domain rating before reaching out to them with a pitch. This one hack can save you a lot of trouble because the last thing you want is to write a guest post for a blog that either has low traffic or a low authority score or domain rating. After all, your goal is to raise your brand awareness, and doing so is more efficient when the site has more traffic and/or authority.
You can use tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to find a site’s traffic; you can also use either tool to find a site’s authority score or domain rating, respectively.
If a site’s traffic and/or authority score/domain rating look good to you (arbitrarily, let’s say a site with at least 1,000 monthly visits or a domain rating of more than 50), then reach out to the website owner or editor.
Usually, they’ll have criteria for what you have to do when you contact them. Some sites want just a pitch or outline while others demand you have to write an entire guest post and then be subjected to their acceptance or rejection. For our money, go with the sites or blogs that want just an outline and then take it from there. Some sites will also gladly provide you with an outline they already have created.
3. Blogging
Blogging is one of the most famous and widely practiced, on-page SEO strategies out there. Blogging refers to the act of regularly writing and publishing content on your website in the form of blog posts. It provides a platform for you to share knowledge, insights, and experiences with your audience.
Blogging helps SEO for small businesses for several reasons. One of the key benefits is that it helps drive organic traffic to websites. When businesses create valuable and relevant blog posts that answer users' queries, search engines recognize their website as a reliable source of information and rank it higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). This increases the visibility of the business and allows you to reach a larger audience.
Furthermore, blogging also helps small businesses establish expertise and build credibility in their industry. By consistently sharing informative and engaging content, you can showcase knowledge and position yourself as a thought leader. This not only attracts more readers but also encourages them to trust and engage with you.
In addition to driving traffic and establishing expertise, blogging allows small businesses to create internal and external links. Internal links connect related blog posts on the website, improving navigation and increasing the time visitors spend on the site. External links, on the other hand, can be used to reference reliable sources and build relationships with other websites, enhancing your overall SEO strategy.
Blogging has a strong track record of success. Just take this case study from Growth Machine. They ran a side project called Cup and Leaf, a blog which focused on tea. In only eight months, they grew Cup and Leaf to more than 150,000 visitors a month, on the strength of publishing content regularly via blogging.
4. Keyword Research
As far as affordable SEO services go, keyword research is the most enlightening. Keyword research involves figuring out which keywords your customers are using to find your brand online. To accomplish this, you’ll have to use an SEO analysis tool like:
You can also use these tools to determine what keywords your website’s webpages are already ranking for, as well as what additional, related keyword phrases and terms would potentially bring more traffic to your website.
Keyword research is the basis of creating appealing site content, which your target audience will be interested to read. The more they read, the more time they spend on your site, which also increases their chances of subscribing to your newsletter, purchasing your products or services, and trusting your brand more.
The key with…keyword research is to focus on finding keywords for which you can rank in Google’s organic search results. All SEO tools usually indicate the level of difficulty for a specific keyword or phrase.
For instance, we are optimizing this very blog post for the keyword phrase “affordable SEO services,” which Semrush indicates only has a 46% difficulty, making it possible to rank for this phrase. Given our domain’s age and DR rating, we have a fair chance to rank for this.
Two other important aspects of any keyword you look for are its search volume and traffic potential. Search volume gives you an indication of how many people actively search for this keyword per month while traffic potential gives you an idea of how many site visitors you can expect per month, if you rank for the keyword in the top ten of the SERPs.
Check out this quick, easy-to-digest video tutorial about how to perform keyword research, featuring Nathan Gotch.
A video from Semrush, featuring Nathan Gotch talking about keyword research.
The video is a quick walkthrough about how to use certain features of Semrush to get the most from your keyword research.
5. Local SEO Services
Local SEO services refer to the strategies and techniques implemented to optimize a website's visibility in local search results. This type of SEO aims to target a specific geographical area, allowing businesses to reach the right audience in their local market.
Local SEO is incredibly important for a website's overall SEO because it helps improve organic search rankings, enhances online visibility, and increases the chances of being found by potential customers in your local area. By optimizing the website for local search, businesses can take advantage of the growing trend of local searches made by consumers looking for products or services in their vicinity.
When done effectively, local SEO can greatly benefit businesses with physical locations such as retail stores, restaurants, and service providers by driving more relevant traffic to their website and increasing foot traffic to their brick-and-mortar locations. It allows businesses to appear in the local pack, local finder, Google Maps, and other local search results which can significantly boost their online presence.
Based on data from WebFX, the average conversion rate of local search is 80%, which is significantly high. So not only does local SEO increase your visibility in your community, but it also provides a healthy conversion rate.
6. Content Marketing
By now, you realize that creating content is a core part of successful SEO, whether it’s blogging or other content created for different marketing channels. Content marketing is a skill you should master.
Content marketing is the creative process of making educational content that lives on your website and other marketing channels for the purpose of establishing your brand as a thought leader in your industry. This content is also ideal for persuasively moving your leads down your sales funnel. Overall, strong content means you will build long-lasting relationships with your target audience, which is crucial to increasing your sales.
Marketing your brand with content takes the shape and form of numerous assets like:
Blog posts
Articles
Ebooks
White papers
Case studies
Reports
Original research
Infographics
Guest posts
Landing pages
Social media posts
Realistically, content marketing is any strategy that uses content to inform your ideal customers without being pushy or salesy. This nurturing approach yields strong results down the road. Don’t expect content marketing to make sales for you immediately. Rather, it’s a long-term play.
7. Video SEO
Video SEO refers to the process of optimizing videos to improve their visibility and rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). It involves using various techniques to increase a video's chances of getting found and watched by the ideal target audience. As more and more small businesses are incorporating videos into their digital marketing strategies, video SEO becomes crucial for your overall SEO success.
Try an experiment: Google almost any phrase, and you’ll see videos appearing in the top ten organic search results or on page 2. This confirms the popularity of video and why it makes sense to produce them for SEO, as a small business.
As an integral part of any affordable SEO services, video SEO helps improve organic search rankings. When properly optimized, videos are more likely to appear in the top search results, increasing the chances of attracting organic traffic. This can significantly boost a small business's online visibility and brand awareness.
Videos have a higher engagement rate compared to other forms of content, such as text or images. As Forbes reported years ago, relevant video content drives more engagement. Video can effectively convey information, evoke emotions, and capture the attention of viewers. By optimizing videos with relevant keywords, engaging titles, and compelling meta descriptions, small businesses can increase the likelihood of viewers clicking and watching their videos.
Video SEO also contributes to improved user experience. When a website includes optimized videos, it provides a more interactive and engaging experience for visitors, ultimately increasing the time spent on the website. This can positively impact other SEO factors, such as dwell time and bounce rate, leading to higher rankings in search engines.
Finally, videos have the potential to generate valuable backlinks. When well-optimized videos provide informative and valuable content, they are more likely to be shared and linked to by other websites, leading to increased referral traffic and better SEO rankings.
Implement these winning strategies for Video SEO:
Design eye-popping thumbnails
Ensure the title tag of your video agrees to the content
Use context in your video description so it reads naturally (instead of just forcing in your keywords)
Tag your video right to ensure it gets categorized right
Include a transcript of your video when you publish it
8. Social Media SEO
Believe it or not, even your social media brand presence can also benefit from an SEO strategy centered around your social profile and posts. While social media SEO won’t directly help your search rankings, it will increase your exposure when your links are shared across various platforms.
When more of your links get shared on social platforms, you benefit from:
Boosting your content to a larger audience
Greater brand familiarity when more people interact with your content
More opportunities from link building (since more people discover your useful content)
Building up your local presence via sharing your business profile and location
While it takes some extra work of having a social presence across numerous channels, the amplified results are worth it.
For instance, let’s say you have a home-repair brand. You can post your videos of fixing things around the house on YouTube, upload your stories about repairing customers’ broken appliances on Instagram, share knowhow of running your business on X, and post more professional content on LinkedIn.
Altogether, these efforts combine to give you a bigger breadth of exposure on social media, which has positive ramifications for your website SEO.
9. Keyword-Gap Analysis
A keyword-gap analysis is a vital strategy in small business SEO that involves identifying the gaps between the keywords your competitors are already ranking for and the keywords that are currently driving traffic to your website. This analysis helps you understand what kinds of content you should create to rank higher than your competitors and overtake them in organic search.
By conducting a keyword-gap analysis, small businesses can gain valuable insights into their online visibility and identify opportunities to improve their search engine rankings.
A keyword-gap analysis provides insights into the competitiveness of certain keywords. It helps identify keywords that are highly competitive and difficult to rank for, allowing you to focus on less competitive keywords that can still generate significant traffic.
To conduct such an analysis, simply use a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs. Whether you call it a keyword-gap or content-gap analysis, the point is the same: You compare the keywords your competitors’ websites rank for but yours does not. You can then analyze the content, based on those keywords, that’s currently driving traffic to your competition’s websites, and reverse-engineer it for use for your own brand. The key lies in making it better than your competitors’ and unique to you, of course.
In Semrush, you simply head on over to the Keyword Gap tool under the Competitive Research section.
For our example, we’ll put in three competitors of The Glorious Company. After running the analysis, we see that the Venn diagram shows how our competitors still rank for a lot of keywords that we’re not yet ranking for. As a result, we already have numerous possibilities for potential content creation.
Scrolling down, we see more detailed analysis that tells us the exact, untapped keywords we can create content around, with the goal of outranking our competitors for said keywords.
Once you’ve identified the competitor keywords you want to rank for, you can create a content strategy around them and publish blog posts and articles meant outrank your competition in organic search.
10. Technical SEO
Technical SEO should be part of any affordable SEO services package. It refers to the optimizations made on a website to improve its visibility and search engine rankings. It focuses on the backend elements of a website, such as:
Website speed
Crawling and indexing
Schema markup
XML sitemaps
Canonicalization
Technical SEO is crucial for small businesses as it helps search engines understand and index their website better. By optimizing technical aspects, it improves the chances of search engines crawling and indexing important pages on the website. This ensures that the website gets the visibility it needs to attract organic traffic.
Your users will be happier, too, as technical SEO helps enhance the user experience, which is a key driver for small businesses' success. A fast-loading website, easy navigation, and mobile-friendliness contribute to positive user experiences and reduce bounce rates. This, in turn, can lead to increased engagement, conversions, and improved rankings.
Technical SEO also plays a vital role in ensuring that websites comply with search engine guidelines and best practices. By adhering to these guidelines, small businesses can avoid penalties and maintain their search engine visibility.
While technical SEO is sometimes overlooked too often, it can make a huge difference. Digital agency Analytive was able to generate a 26x increase in traffic to one of their client’s websites with just four technical SEO tweaks.
11. On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization refers to all the tactics you can implement right on your own website to increase your search rankings. It’s also known as on-site SEO. Contrast this tactic with off-page or off-site SEO, two examples of which are guest posting and external link building. As such, on-page optimization is somewhat easier, gives you quicker results, and gives you more control over what you can and want to do.
Let’s take a look at some major examples of on-page optimization:
Image optimization
Internal linking
Meta descriptions
Alt texts for images
The inclusion of images in site content
Title tags
Heading tags
URL optimization
Adding schema
Keyword optimization
On-page optimization can also yield great SEO results. Take the example of Sure Oak. This SEO agency helped one of their clients see a 92% increase in conversions based on, in part, on-page optimizations.
12. SEO Audit
An SEO audit is a crucial process for small businesses as it can significantly impact their online visibility and overall success. It involves evaluating a website's performance, identifying areas for improvement, and implementing strategies to enhance organic search rankings.
Enhance your online footprint with an SEO audit. It identifies any technical issues that may be hindering the website's visibility on search engines. By resolving these issues, your small business can improve its chances of appearing in front of the target audience, leading to increased visibility and brand awareness.
Conducting an SEO audit allows small businesses to evaluate their competitor's strategies and identify opportunities to outperform them. By understanding what is working for competitors, businesses can adjust their own strategies to gain a competitive advantage.
An audit also provides insights into a website's structure, content quality, and keyword usage. By optimizing these elements, small businesses can improve their website's user experience, increase engagement, and ultimately drive more conversions.
Your SEO audit should also focus on evaluating the speed, mobile-friendliness, and overall usability of a website (aspects of the technical SEO elements mentioned above). By solidifying a positive user experience, small businesses can attract and retain more customers, leading to higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
What Is a Good Budget for SEO?
We get it: As a small business, you need to watch your costs and don’t have the seemingly unlimited budgets that bigger companies enjoy. Just the same, understand that SEO is an investment, even for affordable SEO services.
That said, here’s what you can expect to pay for SEO for your small business in 2024, if you work with a US-based agency. If you go by a monthly retainer, expect to pay around $1,000 and $2,000 per month. If you’re going by an hourly model, it’s about $100 to $200 per hour for affordable SEO services. Keep in mind the big caveat here: These are guidelines only, and these guardrails will ultimately vary depending on the location, experience, and specific services of the agency you choose to partner with.
The other caveat is your option to work with an SEO agency outside the US, where the cost of living is cheaper and so the agency pricing is cheaper. As such, you can reasonably expect to pay a bit less, but how much less?
It’s not uncommon to find non-US agencies that offer SEO services starting from $50 and up and monthly retainers from around $500 and up.
What Is the Difference Between Affordable SEO Services and Just Cheap SEO Services?
Before you get too excited, hold on a second. There’s a distinction between affordable and cheap. Affordable SEO services are those that give you strong value and measurable results in your ROI.
For example, if your agency delivers more organic traffic for your website along with a higher conversion rate for your calls to action, and doesn’t charge you an arm and a leg, then it’s provided you strong value for an affordable price.
A cheap SEO agency, however, doesn’t always correlate to good value for your money. Let’s say you retain an agency on the cheap, and all they do is “fix” a few meta tags on your website and write you a blog post or two per month—that’s not going to move the needle for your website rankings very much.
Resist the temptation to fall for cheap SEO services that don’t give you the value you deserve.
How to Pick an Affordable SEO Services Company
Picking an affordable SEO agency is easier than you may expect. It’s critical you prioritize these four points of criteria for evaluating the agency you partner with.
What Are Your Business Goals?
Before anything else, you need to figure out what goals you’re trying to reach for your business.
Do you want more ROI?
Are you looking for greater organic traffic?
Do you need more conversions on your site?
Do you just want more brand awareness?
Do you need more engagement on your social media channels?
Do you want to position yourself as a thought leader in your field?
Once you have solid clarity around these (and other) factors, you’re in a stronger position to properly evaluate the agency that can bring you closer to these goals.
Evaluate Past Experience, Reviews, and Ratings
When considering working with an SEO agency for your small business, it is crucial to evaluate their past experience, reviews, and ratings. Here's how you can do it effectively:
1. Past Experience: Start by considering the agency's experience in the industry. Look for their track record and how long they have been providing SEO services. A reputable agency would typically mention their experience on their website or during initial discussions.
2. Case Studies and Portfolio: Request case studies or examples of their past work. This will give you insights into the type of businesses they have worked with and the results they have achieved. Look for success stories that align with your industry or business goals.
3. Client Reviews and Testimonials: Check for reviews or testimonials from their previous clients. Consider both positive and negative feedback. Websites like Google My Business, Yelp, or agency directories often provide reliable reviews.
4. Ratings and Certifications: Check if the agency has any certifications or recognitions in the field. This can include being Google Partners, HubSpot certified, or being members of industry associations. These certifications indicate that the agency has met specific standards and is committed to staying up-to-date with industry practices.
5. Online Presence and Authority: Assess the agency's own online presence. Look for their rankings in search engine results, the quality of their website, and their content marketing efforts. A reputable agency should be able to demonstrate their SEO expertise through their own online presence.
Look at Their Pricing and Services
The next item to take a deep look at is the cost of their pricing for their services. As a small business, you’re going to be budget-conscious. The good news is that SEO is a low-cost online marketing strategy when you compare it to other options like PPC (paid ads), social media marketing, email marketing, print ads, TV spots, and so on.
Pricing is going to be correlated to what your engagement with the agency includes. Expect to pay more if you go with on- and off-page SEO together with monthly content creation (like a certain number of blog posts). Of course, if your SEO partnership is simply link building, then you can keep your costs down. How expansive you want the agency’s SEO work to be is up to you.
Pick an agency that specializes in working with small businesses rather than enterprises. This should help you keep costs down.
How Do They Communicate With You?
When an SEO agency is working with a small business, effective communication is essential for a successful partnership. Here are some ways in which an SEO agency should communicate with the small business it works with.
Your agency should schedule regular meetings to discuss the progress, goals, and strategies. These meetings can be conducted in-person, over the phone, or through video conferences, depending on your preferences.
An agency you’re considering should provide clear reports on your website's performance, including key metrics such as traffic, rankings, conversions, and ROI. These reports should be shared on a regular basis to keep you informed about the progress being made.
Any agency should always use open channels of communication, such as email, phone, or project management tools, to ensure prompt communication. This allows the small business to ask questions, seek clarifications, and provide feedback whenever necessary.
Since SEO can be complex and technical, the agency should explain their strategies, processes, and tactics in a way that’s easily understood. This helps you make informed decisions and understand the value provided.
Finally, the agency should actively seek input and feedback from you. This collaboration ensures that both parties are aligned with the goals and objectives, and any concerns or suggestions can be addressed promptly.
Making Affordable SEO Services Work for You
The sweet spot in online marketing is to partner with an agency whose SEO services are both performance-based and affordable. To find a partner like this, you have to do your due diligence and research quite a bit on the internet. With a plethora of agencies advertising their services, this can be a tall order.
On the other hand, you can straightaway choose the SEO agency that’s the trusted partner for many of today’s top brands.
Searching for an SEO agency to partner with for your small business goals? Then get in touch with us immediately. Contact The Glorious Company today for a consultation and quote.
Any questions? Keep the conversation going by leaving a comment below.
Related blog posts you don’t want to miss:
10 Best Boutique Marketing Agencies of 2023