Is SEO worth it? An honest answer for a small business

The honest answer is that it depends on three things, and none of them is the thing the person selling you SEO will ask about. Whether it is worth it for your business is decided before any work starts, by whether people search for what you sell, whether you could take more work if it came, and whether you can wait for it. Get those three right and it is one of the cheapest ways a small business has ever had to find customers. Get one wrong and it is a monthly fee for a report.

Do people search for what you sell?

Most local services are searched for constantly: a plumber, a dentist, a solicitor, a gym, a restaurant. Some things are not. A new kind of product nobody has a name for, a service people find through a referral rather than a search, a business whose customers are all on one platform already. If the search does not exist, there is nothing to win, and the money belongs in referrals, partnerships or advertising that creates demand rather than captures it.

The check takes ten minutes. Type what you sell into Google the way a customer would, with your town, and look at what comes back. If the results are businesses like yours, the search exists and somebody is winning it. If the results are articles, directories or nothing relevant, look harder before you spend.

Could you take more work if it came?

SEO fills a diary. It does not lengthen one. A business that is booked three weeks out, that turns work away, or that cannot answer the phone during the day gets nothing from being found more often except more missed calls. Fix the capacity first, or decide which work you want more of and aim the SEO at only that.

The businesses that get the most from it are the ones with room: a practice with an empty chair two afternoons a week, a trade that could take a second van, a firm that wants a different kind of client than the referrals bring. For them, the searches are the room being filled.

Can you wait a season?

Some of it moves in weeks. A Google Business Profile that is filled in properly, with the right categories, services, hours and recent reviews, starts winning map searches within a month or two, and for many local businesses that is where the first calls come from. The website takes longer: pages written for the searches people make usually take three to six months to rank against established competitors, and competitive terms take longer still.

If you need work this month, SEO is the wrong tool and advertising is the right one. If you can wait a season and want the enquiries to keep coming after you stop paying for them, it is the right one. Most businesses do both for a while and let the advertising taper as the search results take over.

What it actually costs

We do not publish prices, because the work is scoped on a call from what a business needs rather than from a menu. What can be said is what it costs in your own time, which most people underestimate: an hour or two a month to review pages before they go live, to ask customers for reviews at the right moment, and to read a short report. The businesses that get the most from SEO are the ones that do that hour. The ones that hand it over entirely and wait get less, because the reviews and the answers only they can give are half the result.

How to judge it at ninety days

The wrong measure is a ranking report. A ranking is a step on the way and it is cheap to fake with searches nobody makes. The right measures are in accounts you own: impressions and clicks in your Search Console, rising month on month for the searches that matter; calls and direction requests in your Business Profile's own insights; and enquiries in your inbox or your phone log that you can trace to a search. If those are moving at ninety days, it is working. If a report says the rankings are up and none of those has moved, ask why.

When it is not worth it, and what is instead

If nobody searches for what you sell, if you cannot take the work, or if you need it this month, the honest answer is not yet. Referrals and partnerships build slowly and cost time rather than money. Advertising produces enquiries the week it starts and stops the week you stop. A better website with a working phone number and a booking button is worth doing before any of them. SEO is worth it when the three answers are yes, and it is worth more than most things a small business can buy, because the enquiries keep arriving after the work is done.

What the work looks like when it is worth doing is on the SEO services page, and the numbers from clients who let us show them are on the results page, drawn from their own Search Console rather than from ours.