The roles

Working for a digital agency specialising in Finance, the roles required communications within the agency environment, planning, collaborating and implementing SEO work for small businesses.

Background information

A range of small business clients were looked after during the winter of 2023. Much of the SEO work involved training and communicating SEO tasks, often with smaller businesses, websites evolve around essential information and the obligatory pages that consitute ‘about’ ‘contact’ ‘product/service’ ‘blog’. Whilst these pages are essential to a degree, the structure and internal linking and navigation, user experience and opportunities to engage are often overlooked. The static nature of the traditional brochure site also becoming less necessary in terms of – the capabilities of tech coming on in such a way that we are able to deliver more – faster.

The content element of small business sites also tends to be an area on which to focus – reams and reams of duplicate content or a very sparse or ‘unconnected’ collection of content often the most common issues.

Timescale

I always provide an initial six-month period to demonstrate the viability of SEO. This allows me to showcase performance improvements, gather meaningful data, and set realistic targets. It also helps assess the current site, any planned developments, and the internal team’s ability to handle increased demand, conversions, or enquiries.

The Result

The below charts demonstrate the increase in performance during a 6 month period.

Actual Results

Each of the clients received a real difference in terms of revenue (in the case of the ecommerce client/medium budget) and quality enquiries, each establishing stable SERPs postitions on identified Keywords of value.

Reports and KPIs were put in place to further monitor the site performance and a clear outline of what ‘strategically’ needed to happen to further evolve the online presence. There are some essential requirements of a small business in relation to it’s website that should be understood, it is essentially your ‘shop window’ and it, as an absolute minimum, needs to be able to provide a trust and authority score in order for it excel in SEO, whilst there are things an SEO can do to improve these elements, essentially it is a business responsibility to deliver an ethical product, with professional ability and demonstrate it is accountable and has employees that are actively involved in the sector the site is promoting. Furthermore – to provide a truely valuable experience business development needs to evolve into digitisation – this is not necessarily to role of SEO – other than to provide viability and feasibility in terms of the demand or trending data in relation to the idea.