SEO for Small Medium Enterprise (SME)

[Ryeback101]

Hi Guys

I'm looking for some infomation, I was wondering if as a SME owner £75 per month would be enough for SEO? I have been in touch with a few SEO Firms ( Consultants and Agencys) but without little or no luck. Is there just because there is no demand for it by SME's? Secondly is it worth while investing in Social Media and Online Reputation Management? I have read alot of hype about the subject but I am still unsure wthere it is worth while stretching the budget for an extra £20 per month for some twitter blogs and facebook. Its a trickey subject and was wondering if there is anyone who has had to face these same decisions what you did about them.

Cheers

[webpromoterservice]

forget social media for SEO purposes.It is a waste of time.You need quality backlinks to your site and make sure your site is well optimised for the search engines.

I have sent you a PM

Mike

[ComputerCoders]

Hi Guys

I'm looking for some infomation, I was wondering if as a SME owner £75 per month would be enough for SEO? I have been in touch with a few SEO Firms ( Consultants and Agencys) but without little or no luck. Is there just because there is no demand for it by SME's? Secondly is it worth while investing in Social Media and Online Reputation Management? I have read alot of hype about the subject but I am still unsure wthere it is worth while stretching the budget for an extra £20 per month for some twitter blogs and facebook. Its a trickey subject and was wondering if there is anyone who has had to face these same decisions what you did about them.

Cheers

The budget really depends on various factors including the competitiveness of your industry and your perceived results.

[ComputerCoders]

As for Social Media Marketing, the majority of SME decision makers that I speak to are very much results driven and Social Media helping build brand awareness and drive targeted traffic to your website.

There is more to a successful website than just SEO. I think that it's worth you speaking to someone about which specific parts of Internet Marketing are applicable to your business.

[mattsaw]

forget social media for SEO purposes.It is a waste of time.You need quality backlinks to your site and make sure your site is well optimised for the search engines.I'm not so sure I agree with that. Used properly social media can provide the best quality links at the lowest cost.

I've managed to get links from national and international newspapers and authority sites using a mixture of content strategy and social media syndication.

A lot of people tend to think that 'social media' just involves having a Twitter account that posts links to their site and submitting everything they write to Facebook. That's akin to saying SEO is all about submitting your page to search engines.

Anyway, back to the OPs question.

I'm not really sure what you're expecting for £70 per month? SEO, done properly is very time intensive, therefore I don't think you would be getting much for your money. Most of the agencies that I know of charge more than that per hour.

If your budgets are that tight I would suggest trying to do as much DIY as possible.

[WeblinkPlus]

I would echo what Mattsaw says... How much do you spend on other forms of advertising? What business are you in? Why would you want reputation management? Who have you upset :-)

[Ryeback101]

Yeah I read that £70 per hour is believable! I looked at your profile and it states that your in PR, what do u know of online reputation management is it just a fad or is here to stay...

[mattsaw]

Yeah I read that £70 per hour is believable! I looked at your profile and it states that your in PR, what do u know of online reputation management is it just a fad or is here to stay...

I'm actually an SEO, but by an extension of that we do a lot of online PR and also reputation managment.

Online reputation is important to different people for different reasons, it may simply be as much as people taking ownership of profiles in their name at places like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn in order to prevent any malicious use.

We've done reputation managment work (for an obviuously nameless) financial law firm who had an FSA judgement against them which was appearing on several newspaper sites. They estimated they were losying £160,000 of business per month. We were engaged to create more favourable results in order to push down the negative ones.

Also from a PR angle we developed some software which is akin to an online press clippings service. It montors websites, social media and forums for mentions of your brand, useful to PRs in order to provide ROI on their work and useful for companies to monitor and engage their audience.

That said I think for 99% of companies reputation management won't go beyond taking ownership of their brand online. For the unlucky few it becomes far more of a costly priority.

[SEO Positive]

Ryeback101,

In my opinion, you a successful SEO camapign you will need plenty more than £70 per month. Although there are some companies / cowboys out there that will accept your £70 a month, and do nothing, so just be sure to do your research on a company before hiring them.

Hope this helps

[ddudgeon]

I agree, £70 per month won't go very far. If you are working with someone who has specialist expertise in SEO, that would be their hourly charge - if not more. Also, your budget for SEO really depends on what keywords/phrases you are trying to optimise for; for example "insurance" is going to be a lot more expensive than something very niche.

Get in touch if you still need SEO - it's not my area but I work with a small company that competes with the big boys and can make your budget go far. Not sure, but they could probably work with a budget of about £200 per month minimum.

[tomsk]

Ryeback101 I agree with all of the above except would offer one other comment.

Depends on what you are tying to achieve - if you are chasing a very specific term such as "driving lessons Sevenoaks" for example then 10 months SEO at £70 = £700 when I went to school, and that would be a healthy budget for search a term, however if your talking a term such as "mortgages" then you have a problem.

[paretowasright]

forget social media for SEO purposes.It is a waste of time.You need quality backlinks to your site and make sure your site is well optimised for the search engines.

I have sent you a PM

Mike

I would seriously disagree with that statement about social media and have also seen excellent results with a much higher ROI than other methods. Social media if done properly also builds quality back links to you site so kills two birds with one stone. There seems to be a lot of conflicting views about social media currently.