Is SEO worth it for a business like mine?

The short answer

If the people who buy from you start by searching, then yes. Being easy to find and easy to understand is worth doing, and it keeps paying after you stop working on it, because the work does not expire.

So the question is rarely whether to do it. It is whether you do it yourself or pay somebody to do it for you.

When it genuinely is not

There is one real exception, and it has nothing to do with size or sector.

If your work arrives through tender, procurement, framework agreements or trade relationships, your buyers are not searching. Nothing you change on your website alters how they choose. Put the money where it moves something.

A quick way to check: think of your last ten clients and ask how each one first heard of you. If most looked something up, this applies to you. If most came through somebody who already knew you, it does not.

The other case is having nowhere to put the work. If you are booked solid and happy that way, more enquiries are just more people to turn away.

Doing it yourself

This is a real option, and for plenty of businesses it is the right one.

The basics are learnable, most of them cost nothing, and the highest value fixes are usually the least technical. Say clearly what you do and where. Keep your name, address and phone number identical everywhere. Answer the questions customers actually ask, in the words they ask them in. Keep your Google Business Profile current.

We publish the whole method for that reason. Every check we run, in the order we run it, using free tools, is written up in can I audit my own website. It takes nine to fourteen hours the first time.

If you have those hours and you rather like this sort of thing, take them. You will learn things about your own business on the way that no report hands you.

What tips it towards paying somebody

Time, mostly. Then the parts that really are technical: page speed, how the site is structured, structured data, and knowing which three of a hundred possible fixes are the ones that matter for you.

Judge the money against what your empty capacity costs, because that is what the work is trying to sell.

Take a practice charging £60 an hour. Three empty appointments a week is £180 a week. Over a working year of 48 weeks, allowing for holidays, that is about £8,640 of capacity you already pay for and do not sell. Filling some of it costs you almost nothing extra, because the room, the insurance and your time are committed either way.

Set the cost of the work against that number rather than against zero. If the gap is comfortable, paying makes sense. If it is tight, do it yourself and spend the money where it returns faster.

Who this usually turns out to be

Most of our work is with therapy and clinical practices, solicitors, accountants and consultancies, because that shape is common there: bookable time, and clients who go looking. It is not a rule about who we accept, and plenty of businesses outside that list fit better than some inside it.