Marketing and SEO

Although the core of WordPress is already SEO friendly, most sites need some extra help to compete for traffic and sales. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools that can help you apply the best marketing and SEO techniques to your WordPress site .

Marketing and SEO costs vary depending on your business needs and the complexity of the strategy. To determine the cost of your website marketing and SEO strategy, you must first decide whether you want to execute it yourself or hire a professional.

Hiring a digital marketer and an SEO expert is often more expensive. Freelance digital marketers charge around $50-100 per hour , while agencies charge around per hour .

The “do-it-yourself” approach involves the use of SEO plugins , digital tools, and advertisements. You will have to provide more work, but your budget is more flexible. Here are some DIY strategies for marketing your own site:

Use SEO tools like Ahrefs (from around Mangools to plan and control your SEO strategies.

Email marketing. Grow, retain, and refresh your site’s followers by sending content directly to their inbox. Use free email marketing plugins like Mailchimp for WordPress , Jackmail or Newsletter .

Social media marketing. Promote the content of your website to a large audience on social networks like Twitter , Facebook , Instagram and LinkedIn . Use free social media plugins and integration tools like Blog2Social , Social Media Share Buttons or Add To Any .

Affiliate Marketing. Ask influential affiliates to promote your website in exchange for a commission.  Use affiliate marketing plugins like AffiliateWP (from $149/year ) or ThirstyAffiliates (from $49/site ) to manage your affiliate links.

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Use ad networks like Google Ads or Facebook Ads to promote your site in exchange for a pay-per-click. The average cost of Google Ads and Facebook Ads is respectively €2.50 and €3.60 per click.

Landing page. Creating a landing page is key to increasing traffic and conversion rates. Use plugins like SeedProd or Beaver Builder (from €92.37/year ) to create a landing page.

The DIY approach gives you control over your strategies and expenses. If you own a small online business, start by using free SEO and marketing tools. Once you have increased your traffic and revenue, upgrade to premium tools for advanced features.

Maintenance is essential to maintain the security and functionality of WordPress websites.

A poorly maintained website is vulnerable to security breaches, which puts sensitive information on your site at risk. To prevent this from happening and damaging your site’s reputation, you need to perform regular site maintenance.

To calculate the costs of maintaining your website, you must first decide whether you want to do it yourself or hire a website maintenance service.

Hiring a professional will relieve you of the workload, but it is more expensive. This is why most small websites prefer to take care of the maintenance themselves. It’s a demanding task, but it can significantly reduce maintenance costs.

WordPress already comes with useful maintenance features. You can configure WordPress to automatically update its core software, plugins, and themes.

Regular backup of the website is also an essential maintenance task. Many plugins can automate your website backups, such as:

BackUp . A backup and restore plugin with features like scheduled backups, database optimization, Dropbox, and multisite support. You can get its basic features for free or upgrade to a premium version, starting at €64.38/year .

UpdraftPlus . Another freemium plugin that lets you schedule backups and upload files to multiple storage options including Google Drive. The premium version of the plugin starts from 65.31 €/year .

Jetpack Backup . This backup plugin doubles as a security plugin depending on the subscription plan. Get daily backups and 10 GB of storage for €4.62/month .

Besides software updates and backups, consider changing passwords , fixing 404 errors , clearing cache , and fixing broken links as part of your maintenance routine.

You can learn to handle these tasks on your own, but you may need to hire professionals to help you. A site maintenance service provider like webFX charges between $300 and $10,000 per month

 Use a website builder

A website builder allows you to create a professional website without any coding knowledge. It usually comes with a drag-and-drop site editor, which is great for beginners.

To calculate the cost of building a website, you need to choose a site builder and a suitable plan. The more features you need, the more money you will have to spend.

Plans for e-commerce sites are usually more expensive because they include online selling features, such as payment gateways, order management, and multilingual support.