Wordpress business plan

socio

Hi all,

Looking for some advice about Wordpress.com from anyone with experience of their paid business plan. I use the premium paid plan for a small business and I find it great because it's easy to add new content and looks professional. However, SEO is not at the races and I am considering either migrating to Wordpress.org or upgrading my plan to Wordpress.com business, which gives access to plugins that would hopefully improve seo.

Everything I've read says switching to .org is better, and I imagine the pros here will say so. However, wondering if anyone has experiences of .com business plan option (€300 per year) and any examples of websites that have used this and got good results with search engine rankings.

Cheers.

M.T.D

A few background bits and generalisations.
WordPress is a content management system that has been developed from an original blogging platform. You can use it almost as is as a blog (posts) or for a website (pages) or incorporate the cms into a larger site that could have many other functions.

The Wordpress on wordpress.com and wordpress.org are essentially the same. WordPress on wordpress.com is a multisite setup with some restrictions on what you can do, mainly to stop individual sites from doing things detrimental to their system. Using WordPress on your own hosting means you can use whatever theme, plugins, scripts, etc. good or bad, that you want.

SEO is much more to do with content and site set up rather than where (platform) your site is hosted, location and speed issues aside.
Moving a site from wordpress.com to you own hosting, or staying where you are and paying more, will not in itself improve your SEO.
WordPress.com is a company that will promote its own services. Everyone else, including me, will promote either their own offering or their current favourite supplier.

Some plugins will guide you in what to do to improve your website's SEO, but won't write content for you or change the site's structure.
You can learn SEO, as you go along, but you need to weigh up the possibly lost business from a low ranking site while you learn, against the cost of getting someone to do it for you.

socio

Thanks for the good insights MTD. I've read similar things online about content being an important driver for good SEO. In that regard, I think wordpress.com is quite good for encouraging you to update regularly because it's so easy to use if managing a website is not your main focus.
Looking into 3rd option of having it done by someone else as well.

What would say is a rough figure to have a site professionally built and optimised etc?

M.T.D

How much, is the proverbial how long is a piece of string.

A website has to do two main things attract/get found by visitors, and convert the visitors into customers.

You need the right key words to get your target audience to your site
The site has to appeal visually to your visitors and give them the content they want,
Lead the visitor on to the next step in your funnel.

With out knowing your business, products/service, target audience, competition et. I could not give you a meaning full price.
If you don't already have one I would suggest you get/create a marketing strategy report done first. Covering keyword research, target demographic, competitor analysis etc.Then armed with this information you have much better chance of creating a website that will appeal to your target market, have the right keywords for the search engines, and get you leads and sales.