Costs & pricing · 6 min read
Where should a small West Yorkshire business spend its marketing budget?
Spend in this order: get the basics right first (a fast website and a complete Google Business Profile, both free or one-off), then reviews and local SEO, then social content, and only then paid ads. Ads amplify whatever you already have — if enquiries leak at the website stage, paid traffic just makes you lose money faster.
By Raja Wahab, Co-founder, Fixby Studios · Updated
The order of operations
- Foundations. A site that loads fast, says what you do and makes contact obvious. One-off cost, permanent benefit.
- Google Business Profile and reviews. Free, and usually the fastest source of local enquiries.
- Local SEO and service pages. Compounding — the work you do this quarter keeps paying next year.
- Social content. Builds familiarity and trust locally, and feeds everything else.
- Paid ads. Only once the four above are working, so the traffic lands somewhere that converts.
How to judge any spend
Work out what one customer is worth to you over a year. If a roofing job is worth £2,000, one extra job a month makes almost any sensible marketing spend look cheap. If you can't measure enquiries, fix the measurement before increasing the budget.
Where money gets wasted
- Ads pointing at a slow, unclear website.
- Paying for directory listings nobody in Huddersfield uses.
- Rebranding before fixing enquiry capture.
- Posting on five platforms badly instead of two properly.
Answer a few questions and we'll tell you where your money is best spent.
Raja Wahab is co-founder of Fixby Studios, a Huddersfield studio building websites, SEO, social media and business software for small, owner-managed businesses across West Yorkshire.
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Fixby Studios builds websites, runs SEO and manages social media for small businesses across Huddersfield and West Yorkshire.