8 Best Digital Marketing Agencies for Small Businesses in 2023

Straight North has some of the best PPC management services out of any small business digital marketing agency on this list, thanks mainly to how comprehensive it is for the price. Starting at $500 monthly (which is the standard price for most digital marketing agencies) or 15% of your monthly marketing budget, Straight North can set up PPC advertising for search (Google and Bing), ecommerce, display ads, and social media.

Straight North’s SEO services cover search-optimized content writing or rewriting, website optimization (including mobile optimization, site speed, and more), and link building. They can also target your SEO campaigns to local or national audiences or tailor them for ecommerce if you have an online store—the latter can help increase your store’s credibility, search engine ranking, and more. They also offer enterprise SEO services for larger companies.

Straight North can also build a business website for you, complete with a sitemap, content, Google Analytics, and more. They also offer higher plans for larger, more comprehensive websites, or a plan with combined website-building and SEO services.

Once your site is built, you can increase traffic to your website with content written and published to your site by Straight North. The team can also create assets like infographics and downloads to increase backlinks to your site and help build your email contact list.

Straight North also has an in-house creative team to design assets for your business, from presentations to logos, brochures, and more. Pricing is on a project-by-project basis, meaning you can avail of their creative services anytime you need a project designed, without committing to a larger plan. For any project, you’ll only need to discuss your vision and brand requirements, and the team will present designs for you to approve.

Branding is a service that sets this provider apart from others on this list. As such, it’s our top pick for the best startup marketing agency. Your initial consultation will cover the digital marketing strategies needed to get your brand on the map with your audience and in your industry.

WebFX offers services for website design, redesign, and maintenance if it’s time for a brand refresh or your website simply isn’t performing well. Each site includes options like SEO, responsive web design, database integration, an ecommerce platform, page design, and various styles to match your brand needs. After the design, they do all the copywriting for your site to ensure it’s search-friendly.

WebFX offers services for custom keyword research, optimization, and content strategy and creation to meet your goals. They also offer link building, an in-depth SEO audit based on your industry, and competitor analysis. Plus, you’ll also receive a technical audit identifying performance issues, such as slow site speeds, site map errors, and link profile errors. The SEO plans offer different numbers of key phrases for optimization, ranging from 150 to 300.

WebFX also offers off-page SEO strategies like Google Business Profile optimization and local search optimization across business listing sites. They provide SEO strategies by U.S. location or global region. Finally, they offer SEO for ecommerce and for Amazon stores. This includes keyword research for 25 to 50 optimized keywords per product, product listing, product description copywriting, category, and subcategory optimization.

In plans as low as $300 per month, WebFX will help you create an email campaign, targeting strategy, and A/B testing to use email marketing for lead generation. The service includes content creation and personalization to ensure high-performing emails. You can even have a landing page created to improve conversions from email marketing as an add-on.

WebFX offers review management services, email, and social as part of its off-page marketing services. Social media services include profile setup and optimization, as well as post and content creation. Meanwhile, email marketing services include content creation and personalization, A/B testing, campaign design and coding, email distribution, landing page development and publishing, and targeted list building.

Regarding local SEO, WebFX’s review management services and software include an initial brand reputation analysis. The team will then set up, claim, and optimize review listings across Google Business Profile, Apple Maps, and Facebook. WebFX also offers daily software monitoring of review sites like Google, Facebook, and Yelp. You can monitor your positive and negative reviews via separate dashboard streams and respond to each type accordingly.

WebFX uniquely offers geofencing ads starting at $550 per month. These are pay-per-click (PPC) mobile ads sent to apps and mobile pages people view after entering a defined area, like near a competitor’s business. Its starter plan offers up to 15 conversion zones and traffic data for a webform, ecommerce, and foot traffic.

They also provide advertising services for Google Ads Network, Bing, and across YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Lastly, with programmatic ads, WebFX leverages AI to place online ads when and where target audiences will likely see them.

WebFX’s reporting stands out for offering a proprietary return on investment (ROI) dashboard, which measures the return for every $1 you invest in your marketing plan with WebFX. Metrics represented in this dashboard include the revenue you receive based on the number of leads you earn, the cost-per-click for all leads, and the number of lead-generating calls to your business. You can also filter your results by a start and end date.

SEO is the cornerstone of SEO Discovery, and this shows in its comprehensive list of SEO services. They offer local, global, and ecommerce search engine optimization, which include keyword and content optimization, plus extras like voice search and zero click (snippet) optimization, and more. They also offer SEO for Shopify and Drupal, link-building campaigns, and SEO consultancy services.

Whether your objective is awareness, engagement, loyalty, or increasing your site traffic, SEO Discovery can build a social media campaign to grow your business on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, or LinkedIn. This includes analyzing your market, creating your brand story, and building and executing a content strategy. You can also run campaigns on two, three, or all four channels at a higher price.

SEO Discovery can also run PPC ad campaigns for your brand on Google, Bing, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and Yahoo. These include search, display, video, local, and in Google’s case, Google Shopping. They also cover multiple industries, from finance and healthcare to lifestyle, real estate, and more. For more ecommerce-focused businesses, they also offer PPC ad services tailored specifically for Amazon.

SEO Discovery also stands out for its comprehensive content writing and content marketing services. Beyond the usual website content and blog post, they can write content for social media, press releases, and product descriptions for any topic and industry, with prices starting as low as $60 per article.

For website design, SEO Discovery can build a completely custom website with responsive design and ecommerce features. Their services also include website wire-framing, logo, user interface (UI), user experience (UX) design, and user testing to ensure your sites quality. As add-ons, you can also include live chat, site maintenance, social integrations, and more.

SEO Discovery’s reputation management services involve managing your online reviews, improving your on-page SEO, creating and managing your social profiles, building reputable links to your site, and then monitoring your overall performance.

You can also avail of backlinking as a separate service from SEO Discovery. What’s more, SEO Discovery offers these services whether you’re a business owner looking to build your credibility or a blogger looking to expose your content to more audiences. For business owners, they also have a team of writers to write your guest post, which they’ll send out to their network of over 1,000 bloggers. Once your post is published, you’ll also receive a full report of your campaign.

SEO Discovery also offers website analytics via Google. They’ll set you up with Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google Search Console. Then, their analytics experts will evaluate your site’s performance on each and give recommendations for your business’ growth.

Finally, another area that makes SEO Discovery unique is their influencer marketing services—out of this list, it’s the only small business marketing agency that offers it as a standalone service. Their experts will source influencers based on your niche (e.g., fashion, fitness, etc.), then manage the content creation and campaign management processes.

Lyfe Marketing’s expert marketers develop, create, and manage your social profiles on Facebook and Instagram. This service includes monitoring pages and responding to comments and queries, building brand awareness, and increasing followers. It also directs traffic to your website for conversions.

Although a team works with you to create and run your strategy effectively, your point of contact is a dedicated account manager. Account managers will first help develop a strategy based on your business objectives, industry, and competitors. From there, they will create a content calendar with posts unique to your brand. Finally, they monitor your accounts to tweak and optimize your campaign.

Lyfe Marketing’s paid social media advertising services include on-brand ads for both Facebook and Instagram, which are best paired with social media management. However, you can also pay an extra $100 monthly for additional platforms, like Twitter or LinkedIn. Aside from creating ads pinpointed toward your target demographic, they also track and manage campaigns, launch retargeting strategies, and work with location-based advertising.

If you’re not sure whether paid social is a good fit for your digital marketing plan, read our guide to the 10 most popular paid social channels for advertising. It details the demographics of each platform to help you decide where to focus your efforts.

Lyfe Marketing’s PPC services include pay-per-click advertising on Google, with added fees for advertising on Bing. They don’t provide PPC management for other search engines like Amazon (although social media PPC is included in their advertising service). The ads they create are all fully optimized for their respective platforms, including highly targeted visuals, videos, and copy.

You’ll be assigned a dedicated advertising manager to oversee your account. This manager will develop a PPC strategy, identify your business’ keyword opportunities, and perform competitor analysis. From the research, a team of experts will design and create ads and perform A/B testing to further optimize your campaign. They will also perform daily monitoring and campaign tweaking on your behalf.

Lyfe Marketing’s SEO services start with a site audit and include keyword research, optimization, and content strategy to drive traffic to your website from prominent search engines, excluding Amazon. Like WebFX’s SEO services, they include Google Business Profile setup and optimization.

Aside from on-page optimization, Lyfe Marketing also performs off-page tactics like link building. However, unlike Ignite Visibility, it doesn’t offer internal link building and optimization. However, there is location-based and ecommerce SEO to help you target niche audiences.

Although not clearly stated on their website, content marketing is part of the digital marketing agency’s services. They create unique, high-quality blogs, viral videos, and infographics designed to drive traffic to your website by inserting relevant keywords. Lyfe Marketing includes automatic distribution of the content on social media platforms to this service.

A la carte email marketing services with Lyfe start at $500 monthly. This is more expensive than with WebFX; however, it includes two emails per month—one more than WebFX’s base tier. Email marketing includes email design and copy creation, list maintenance, and monthly reporting. There’s also an option to add on a four-email drip campaign series for $500.

There’s a $300 setup fee for this service, but as with other Lyfe Marketing services, they will likely waive it if you ask.

Ignite Visibility can set up your small business website, help you transfer or redesign your website for rebranding, or simply drive more traffic to your current site via optimization. They code each site from scratch, creating a custom site that aligns with your business model, industry, target consumer, and goals.

One plus is that Ignite Visibility also specializes in multiregional websites. As a result, your content comes across well no matter where your customer is located—making it ideal for businesses with regional franchises.

Ignite Visibility’s SEO process begins with keyword analysis based on your business and industry along with optimization of your website (including code optimization). They then incorporate the ranking keywords throughout your site to increase its visibility on search results.

Ignite Visibility’s consultants will optimize both your internal and external linking strategies. In addition to following best practices for internal linking, they also reach out to get backlinks from high-authority sites and engage influencers to create more brand awareness and website traffic.

They’ll also target your audience by location locally or internationally, using a location-based keyword strategy on your website. They create a location-specific brand reputation across business listing sites and social media by claiming or building your business pages, incorporating your contact information, and building positive reviews. Amazon and ecommerce SEO is also offered for stores.

As part of its SEO services, Ignite Visibility creates a plan to optimize your website’s on-page content using ranking keywords taken from their keyword analysis. A team of expert writers and editors will then incorporate the keywords in appropriate pages on your website, all while optimizing existing web pages. They can also craft new content to include topics your target audiences are searching for.

Ignite Visibility offers services for email marketing, short message service (SMS) text messaging, and push notifications. This makes it a great option for restaurants and retailers looking to drive website and in-person traffic through strategic email marketing campaigns.

Email marketing services include strategy development, triggered and data-driven messaging, contact list growth, and advanced analytics and optimization. They will also integrate email marketing services alongside your customer relationship management (CRM), making it a great option for sales-oriented businesses looking to nurture leads and grow sales through email marketing.

Ignite Visibility offers a long list of off-page marketing strategies, including social, email, Amazon marketing, and public relations. After completing on-site optimization, they create and employ marketing strategies for other channels. For example, they create a strategy for marketing on social channels that heavily integrates with your website’s content strategy to earn more links and brand awareness.

Ignite Visibility’s email growth strategy services follow the same pattern. First, they help you build an email marketing list. Then, they employ a custom email marketing plan based on competitor research, target consumer insights, your business size, and your goals.

What sets Ignite Visibility apart from the other digital marketing agencies on this list is their services for franchises. First, they start with optimizing your website for your audiences, no matter where they are. Then they implement a multiregional SEO and paid search strategy for foreign language queries. They also work on your social media profiles through organic and paid social strategies to attract customers to your brick-and-mortar stores.

Ignite Visibility offers paid search management and Google Display, Facebook, Amazon, and Bing advertising. They pair you with an expert on online marketing for small businesses who consults with you on how to increase revenue and leads while cutting costs via targeted strategies and a pay-per-click audit.

They offer targeted and retargeted ads for U.S. consumers and can create international PPC campaigns. Finally, they build landing pages to capture leads. If you’re not sure how this benefits your business, learn how to create a landing page and what you need to do to ensure it produces conversions.

Hibu’s web design services ensure a branded, smooth site visitor experience. It also ensures that search engines can easily index your site to help it rank higher on Google.

Websites are custom-built around each client’s goals, industry, and brand. They are then synced with up to 60 online business directory listings, including social platforms and business listing sites, to ensure that information is always up to date and consistent across the brand’s online presence.

Hibu offers many SEO services to improve the visibility of your website’s content among your target audiences. This includes optimizing existing content for search engines, managing meta tags, detecting duplicate content, optimizing for mobile, building link profiles, and auditing websites for search bots.

Hibu’s business listing management includes local SEO. They constantly review and manage your business information (e.g., business name, contact information, hours of operation, and even photos and promotions) across business listing sites like Google Business Profile and Foursquare. Once they confirm your information, it is automatically updated across the web, then “locked” so it can’t be edited without authorization.

Hibu also offers review and reputation management services by giving you a dashboard to monitor and respond to reviews across all your business listings. You can request feedback from the dashboard via email. When customers respond with feedback, you can invite those who replied positively to post a review on one of your business listing sites.

In addition, Hibu offers Listings Management to monitor and manage all of your online business listings, including on voice search platforms like Siri, Alexa, and Google. Give Hibu a call with changes, and they’ll ensure your listings are updated online.

Hibu offers social media, search, and display advertising for search engine marketing. Social media ads extend across Facebook and Instagram, and Hibu carefully targets each ad to appear before potential leads and continues to retarget them to increase brand familiarity and the chance of a conversion.

Hibu’s search (aka pay-per-click) and display marketing ads also advertise your business, which your customers frequent across the web. For example, search ads target consumers on the most popular search engines⁠—like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Advertising. Display ads target consumers across the websites they most frequent, including blogs, news sites, Gmail, and social media sites.

Hibu offers limited social media marketing services for small businesses, mainly for Facebook. The team will set up your Facebook page and create and run ads to keep visitors returning to your profile and website. If you need a more robust or standalone solution, however, we recommend Lyfe Marketing or Fiverr Pro.

Thrive works with you to build a custom website that reflects your business and ensures a seamless marketing experience for your customers. Whether you need a website to attract new clients or an ecommerce website complete with a store, Thrive can do it all for you. If you need a website you can maintain by yourself, Thrive also offers WordPress and Shopify design services.

Thrive can help optimize your website to garner more site traffic. First, they perform keyword research and build a strategy for your site. Then, they create content or optimize your existing content with these keywords. Thrive also performs local SEO (alongside their reputation management services) and off-page optimization with social media marketing.

Aside from general SEO, Thrive also has extensive ecommerce optimization to help customers make purchasing decisions more seamlessly. They can optimize your website, but they also offer SEO for specific ecommerce marketplaces like Walmart and Target.

After learning your business’ goals for social channels, Thrive’s experts will craft a social media plan and create ads for various platforms. There are services for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Pinterest.

Aside from developing content for social feeds, Thrive also works to build your brand presence on social channels. Thrive ensures that your branding stays consistent across all platforms and your website. Finally, their services include managing your profiles, so you don’t have to worry about responding to queries or fostering conversations.

In conjunction with social media, Thrive works to build a positive reputation for your brand through its reputation management services. As a client, you can access an easy-to-use reputation management dashboard to monitor and respond to your reviews on different platforms. They also perform reputation repair services, which work to erase any fake or malicious reviews.

Fiverr Pro freelancers offering web design services often specialize in creating sites on the best website builders, like Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, and Shopify. Some specialize in designing certain types, like ecommerce sites, community forums, or blogs. Many have tiered plans with different features, including websites with one or multiple pages, extension installment, branding, ecommerce functionality, or responsive design.

Fiverr SEO experts specialize in certain types of SEO tasks and campaigns, such as writing optimized content for your blog, product descriptions, or local SEO citations. Others can help fix technical website errors like website speed and responsive design errors. They also perform tasks specific to a content management system or CMS (e.g., WordPress or Wix). Because SEO is so broad, look for a Fiverr provider specifically offering the types of SEO projects you seek to complete.

Fiverr contractors cover a range of services like social media, email, and Amazon marketing, as well as local SEO citation building and reviews management. To find the providers that offer a specific type of off-page marketing, use the search bar to input the platform you wish to market on plus “marketing.”

For example, search “email marketing” or “social media marketing.” Then, peruse the providers to learn the specific tasks they complete (social media content creation or influencer marketing, for example).

Fiverr advertising specialists offer a long list of ad-related services, including pay-per-click ads, animated video ads, hand-drawn advertisements for digital assets, banner ad design, advertising on Facebook, and display ads. To find a provider who offers the specific types of ads you seek, simply search for that ad type using the Fiverr search bar. For example, you could search “Facebook ads,” “Google ads,” or “display ads.”

Fiverr freelancers offer two types of analytics: general website analytics and analytics specific to the type of campaign created by the provider. If you are looking for analytics reporting for a campaign a Fiverr pro created for you, be sure to ask what types of reporting and what tools they used when creating your campaign.

If you need someone to install analytics on your website or help you track analytics around your existing campaign (like social media analytics, for example), simply search the platform you’d like to track, then “analytics.” For example, search “Facebook analytics” or “Google Analytics” to find relevant providers.

Hiring a small business marketing agency can definitely be worth it for a custom, professional marketing strategy built specifically around your business’ needs. There are dozens of digital marketing agencies with various price points and specialties, and you’ll likely find one that suits your needs. Determine which services you need, canvass agencies and review their work, and then schedule a consultation to see if they’re a good fit.

The cost to work with a digital marketing agency for small businesses varies based on the service provided and the scope of work. However, you could spend as little as $100 for an a la carte service or as much as tens of thousands of dollars for a completely outsourced digital marketing solution. And in either case, it could be worth it if the return on investment outweighs your costs.

Digital marketing for small businesses usually involves setting up a website, optimizing for search engines (SEO), social media marketing, and PPC advertising. Other helpful and affordable strategies are email marketing, review management, and setting up a Google Business Profile.