How To Start A Small Business Uk – SEO has taken on an almost mythical status in the minds of many. It is often considered a one-stop marketing solution to achieve business prosperity in this digital age.
As ecommerce accountants, we see our fair share of UK SEO marketing budgets. But it’s not just e-commerce businesses that are spending money on SEO in the UK. We’ve seen SEO budgets for freelancers, small businesses, landlords, and many other types of businesses.
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We also do a good bit of SEO in our accounting practice. And our forward-thinking approach to technology has earned us a finalist for the Intuit Global Business of the Future award.
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The following is a comprehensive guide to what we know works when doing SEO specifically for small businesses based in the UK.
The most widely used language on the Internet, accounting for 60.4 percent of the top 10 million websites in the world.
For this reason, when competing internationally, English-speaking countries such as Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc. are at a particular disadvantage. while trying to reach a global audience.
At the same time, the UK has an advantage in other ways – when you focus on UK-specific services, you have far less competition for the number one spot on search engines compared to the US. The sheer number of internet users and websites in the US is far worse than the size of the UK.
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To that end, the first thing a UK small business needs to know about SEO is that it needs to be focused on
Dotcom domains are considered “international” domains. But using country-specific codes is an important signal to search engines, letting them know that the content on your site is country-specific
These “territories” in domains (.com, .co.uk, .net, etc.) are called “Top Level Domains” (TLDs), and the country-specific ones are called “Country Code Top Level Domains”. respect or ccTLDs.
Of course, if you’re a mega-sized corporation, you can probably afford the huge budget needed to compete on a global SEO scale and just stick to your .com domain. But for small businesses in the UK, it’s easier to target
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Traffic and get a .co.uk domain to tell search engines that your website is specifically for people in the UK.
Let’s say you get a quote for SEO services of £20,000 per month from an agency (the best SEO agencies will rarely charge less than £10,000 per month for a full SEO service). That’s £240,000 a year! Would SEO get an agency that gives you up to
£240,000 a year? If you’re only selling products for a few pounds each, you’re unlikely to make that kind of return.
The good news is that learning the basics of SEO is easy. It takes a bit of work, and the biggest problem for many small businesses in the UK is finding the time to do it.
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But the question comes down to Roy. And, in that case, we can offer a simple calculation to see if SEO is worth doing in your UK small business.
Taking an insight from this Forbes article, we see that the number one position on Google gave an agency a 36% click-through rate. (“Click-through rate” is the percentage of people who click on a link compared to the number of times it is displayed. So if your website appears 100 times in search engines and gets 20 clicks, then its CTR, or bounce rate, is 20% clicks.)
Another metric to understand is conversion rate. It is very loosely defined as the number of people who buy something from your website compared to the number of visitors it has had. So if 1,000 people visited your website and 20 of them bought something, that’s a 2% conversion rate.
Using those numbers, we can mathematically determine whether online advertising or SEO is the best option for you. (Or, even, if paid SEO vs. DIY-SEO is the way to go.)
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We assume that you have done your UK SEO correctly and that your website is appearing 1000 times a month in the #1 position on the search engines. With a 36% click-through rate, that’s 360 visits per month. Let’s imagine that the average luxury is worth £500. So with a 2% conversion rate, that’s seven sales at an average of £500 each—or £42,000 a year.
We can immediately see that it is not worth the £10,000 fee for SEO services (£120,000 per year). But DIY SEO would certainly cost less than a £42,000 investment per year.
But what about paid advertising? Well, let’s assume you’re paying an average of £3.00 per click (a bit of a low estimate if you’re targeting London, but let’s be generous for the sake of this article). For the same 360 visits, you would pay £1,080.
This means you would still make a profit if you used online advertising and your annual return would be £42,000 – £12,960 = £29,040.
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And the numbers we used above may be on the high side. If the average conversion value drops to £50, we’re down to £4,200 a year and you’d be in the red if you went the advertising route!
Another thing to keep in mind is that the benefits of SEO are long term. Although paid advertising ends when you stop paying to have your ad appear in search results, well-done SEO means your site can stay in search engines for years to come without you having to lift a finger.
Part of making sure your SEO efforts last as long as possible is creating “evergreen” content for your website (content that remains relevant even years after it’s written).
You have nothing to lose by starting a DIY SEO strategy for your business and everything to gain.
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Good SEO on your website will benefit your business’ web presence in the long run, but jumping in and paying for advertising is temporary. (And it affects your bank account.)
The place to start with SEO is to make sure you have a website that meets all the basic requirements for good SEO. This is called “on-page” SEO.
To improve the chances of being found on search engines. (Off-page SEO includes promotions, ads, guest blogs, etc. that encourage people to link to your website from their own websites.)
All of the above elements automatically, so you don’t need to hire someone specifically to take care of everything.
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The most popular system that does this is, by far, WordPress. (This is probably based on the fact that WordPress is free.) Next up is Shopify which is specifically for e-commerce websites. (Shopify isn’t free, although it’s easier to set up than WordPress.)
If you use one of these two systems (or others like Joomla or Drupal), you only guarantee everything
WordPress also has some popular plugins that help newbies with some of the more complex aspects of on-page SEO. One such plugin is called RankMath and it’s free. Following the instructions provided by this plugin will go a long way in getting the basics of SEO right.
But if this was all it took to get great SEO in the UK, then any website that ran WordPress and used some SEO plugins would be at the top of the search engines, right?
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For your UK job, and you always have to work on it. Below is our recommended strategy for small businesses in the UK that don’t have a huge SEO budget.
Above all, get a .co.uk domain! This is the most important first thing you should do to increase your small business’s chances of being found in the UK.
If you already have a .com, .net or any other domain, you can set up an automatic redirect from this domain to your .co.uk domain. Your web host may be able to help you with this.
A “CMS” or Content Management System is a website that makes it easy for you to manage it
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WordPress is free, but it’s a do-it-yourself solution, so you need to know about website setup to set it up properly. (However, many hosts these days offer automatic installation of WordPress with the click of a button.)
The paid version of WordPress limits the types of plugins you can install, but that’s why DIY WordPress has a brutal reputation for being the best meal for hackers.
This is a great topic that you can always learn about. But as a beginner’s guide, here’s the most important thing you need to know:
This last point is crucial. There are several keyword tools out there, some paid and some relatively expensive. Depending on your budget, you can look at:
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Some of the tools listed above offer additional SEO tools that can provide a lot of insight to both newbies and SEO veterans.
Important: When searching for your keywords, play around with UK-specific phrases and words. Also, add “UK” to your search query and see what comes up. As a small business in the UK,
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