December 18, 2019

10 Ways to Fix Your SEO Strategy on a Budget

Every online business needs an effective SEO strategy to help ensure its success.

What is SEO you ask?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a process implemented by businesses to ensure their websites rank high in search engine results.

It all boils down to outranking your competitors, which may seem difficult for those working within a smaller budget.

But don’t let this discourage you!

There are many ways to achieve that page one ranking, you just have to know your way around SEO mechanics.

To help in your quest to outrank your competitors, here are ten ways to fix your SEO strategy – while remaining within your budget.

1. Understand Your Budget’s Limitations & Improvise

When working within a small budget, it’s important to understand what you can and can’t do. Oftentimes, compromises must be made.

If you’re limited on:

  • Resources – You don’t have to have the top-of-the-line toolset to achieve SEO success. Consider finding free or less expensive alternatives to those pricy log-file analyzers, keyword trackers, and backlink identifiers.
  • Knowledge – Try pinpointing your weak areas. Then dedicate some time to developing your skills. 
  • Time – Unfortunately, there is no way to make more time to spend on SEO. You can, however, try to eliminate any distractions and focus harder on your work.

2. Get Your Name Out There

Taking the time to build your online reputation may be a tedious task, but it can save you significant amounts of money.

You can increase authority and awareness in your industry by becoming a recognized content publisher.

By integrating a blog into your website, you can produce trustworthy and reliable content that can ultimately affect your SEO ranking.

Establish a name for yourself in your niche and deliver content that prompts readers to comment, like, or share.

Comments add to the overall length of a post…and longer posts essentially increase the chances of higher SEO ranking.

3. Know What to Optimize

When dealing with SEO logistics, knowing which optimizations to prioritize first is crucial.

Be Sure Your Site is Mobile Friendly

We live in a digital world, where everything is accessible through our mobile devices. More than half of all searches are made via mobile devices. And the numbers will only continue to rise.

Chances are if someone visits your website and has difficulty navigating it…they will exit the session and leave it at that.

It’s All About Speed

Your website’s loading speed is critical when it comes to SEO. Mainly because Google recognizes slow loading speed, which ultimately harms your ranking.

Additionally, a reported 40% of visitors will leave your site if it takes more than three seconds to load. And a whopping 80% will never return.

You can use free online services like Pingdom to test your website’s speed.

4. Know Your Competitors

SEO rankings boast immense amounts of competition. Though this may seem intimidating, you can actually use it to your advantage.

You can save a lot of resources and time by observing your competition.

By implementing reverse engineering, you can analyze your competitors’ success strategies and incorporate them into your website. However, this doesn’t imply that you need to blindly copy what everyone else is doing.

Utilize free services like Link Explorer, as well as our SEO Audit Tool to help simplify the process.

5. Know Your Strengths

Though having a small budget may seem like a disadvantage, you must have some successful elements to bring to the table.

Figure out what is available to you and utilize the resources, skills, and knowledge that you have access to.

If you are limited on resources, consider reaching out to local businesses or other members of your community…chances are they will need something that you can provide.

Don’t limit yourself to your immediate team, instead, consider seeking out support from outside sources.

6. Set Expectations

Having set SEO expectations is essential to every successful SEO strategy.

By analyzing your website’s current organic traffic baseline, you can implement a predictive model and ultimately establish the estimated growth in organic traffic.

Just because some SEO tactics are out of reach right now…doesn’t mean it’s unattainable in the future.

7. Fix Your Problems

Having a website that is fundamentally flawed is a surefire way to set yourself up for failure.

Performing an SEO audit can reveal these flaws in your website’s structure. Though the process may be time-consuming, it can pinpoint errors, bugs, slow load time, broken pages…the list goes on.

It may be more beneficial to assess and resolve any current issues before moving forward with your website. You may be surprised at what some cleaning up can do for your SEO ranking.

8. Quality Over Quantity

When it comes to your website’s content, you may have heard that more is better.

And if all your content is high-quality – then you’d be spot on.

On the contrary, if you’re producing tons of low-to-mid-quality content, this doesn’t actually help with your SEO ranking.

You want to be sure to produce content that proves to be both valuable to your site and useful to your target audience.

Keep your content up to date and relevant to your niche to ensure your visitors come back for more.

9. Start Blogging

Blogging can be an extremely efficient tool for your business. Not only does it generate leads, but it also improves your SEO ranking.

A high-quality blog can incorporate many SEO elements such as:

  • Keywords
  • Backlinks
  • Meta descriptions
  • Titles and tags
  • Headers
  • Readability
  • Shareable content

A successful blog can generate tons of organic traffic to your site. By producing up-to-date and relevant content, you can establish a faithful audience full of readers who will frequent your site on a daily basis.

10. Choose Your Keywords Carefully

Keywords and keyword phrases are essential to every SEO strategy.

For those who are working with a small SEO budget, using long-tail keywords or phrases can be very beneficial. Due to the substantial amount of competition, it’s imperative to research keywords before running with them.

Try to be relevant without being too specific with your keywords or phrases. Also, be sure to avoid oversaturating your website with keywords because it can have adverse effects on your SEO ranking.

Create a Successful SEO Strategy

There are countless alternatives and methods for creating a successful SEO strategy – while remaining within a small budget.

Remember these key takeaways:

  1. Understand your budget’s limitations.
  2. Get your name out there.
  3. Prioritize your SEO optimizations.
  4. Learn from your competition
  5. Know your strengths.
  6. Set expectations.
  7. Fix your problems.
  8. Quality content is better than lots of content.
  9. Start blogging.
  10. Know your keywords (see: a Guide to Identifying Keyword Intent).

Sources:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/build-seo-strategy-small-budget/337887/?ver=337887X3
https://neilpatel.com/blog/outrank-competition/
https://www.lyfemarketing.com/blog/increase-search-engine-optimization/
https://www.sitepoint.com/9-seo-ideas-small-businesses-budget/
https://ahrefs.com/blog/diy-seo/

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