How To Optimize Your SEO On A Budget

Did you know your website can rank higher in search results even with a small budget? Indeed, you don’t need to spend significantly every month to make substantial gains to get more visitors to your site. So what’s holding you back?

Perhaps, knowledge and know-how, therefore, this article is for you. We look at how you can use free SEO tools and other nifty solutions, including Google My Business, dynamic website content, and keywords, to control your site is position in organic search results.

Your business can get more website traffic without spending thousands monthly on an SEO campaign or other marketing strategies.

Contrary to popular belief, SEO can be more cost-effective than most other marketing forms, including social media marketing and pay-per-click ads. Like everything in life, you need to be in the know, so let’s start with which SEO strategies you can implement without spending significant monthly.

Utilise Free SEO Tools

SEO can be complicated, but luckily, many free tools help you, including keyword research, on-page SEO, and link building.

Plus, the best free SEO tools are incorporated directly into your website.

For example, Yoast SEO for WordPress or Joomla’s EFSEO will guide you through the necessary steps for setting up your website so it’s SEO-friendly.

Without fail, make sure your site is SEO-friendly from the get-go so search engines can use their bots or spiders to crawl your site and index every page. With minimal SEO experience, search engines need not know when your site has the right SEO tools.

In addition to an SEO plugin, consider other tools like a writing assistant or grammar checker so your content is well-written with keywords. Before we get to keywords and their place in your SEO strategy, let’s look at how you can target clients using Google My Business.

Use Google My Business

If you’re a small business or a brick-and-mortar business, you should focus on getting local exposure rather than trying to target potential clients from across the country. This is best done by optimising your “Google My Business” page. Formerly known as Google Places and sometimes called a Google Map listing, this tool works by showing information about your business on the Google search engine results page.

As a result, when someone searches for keywords related to your business, they will see your business listed in the search page results.
When setting up your Google My Business page, you’ll be asked to select categories that describe your business.

When selecting these categories, you need to be specific. For example, if you’re a cupcake bakery, you should choose “cupcake bakery” instead of “bakery.”

Include Keywords in Key Places

Start by identifying your keywords. If you have a limited budget, you should focus your SEO efforts on long-tail keywords. A long-tail keyword is a phrase that is extremely specific to your customers’ needs.

While there is a lot of competition for keywords like “dance instructor,” long-tail keywords have less competition because they are so specific, so it’s best to focus on them. This means instead of focusing on the keyword “dance instructor,” you should focus on a long-tail keyword like “salsa dance instructor in Phoenix.”

Once you’ve decided what long-tail keywords to focus on, you must start including them on your website. You should place these keywords in crucial places like page titles, URLs, and website content.

Create Fresh Content

Publishing new content regularly is crucial to improving your website’s search engine rankings. This is because every time new content is added to your site, Google’s web crawler will visit your site and index it. This means that Google is analysing your website and recalculating how it should be ranked, which improves your chances of getting a high ranking.

However, the web crawler won’t boost your site’s ranking because you have new content.

The content has to be high quality, relevant to your audience, and unique. The more valuable content you post to people searching for your targeted keywords, the better you will rank. With this SEO strategy, you are in complete control.

If you’re writing the content, ensure you have learned how to contribute content your website visitors want. Use social media and email marketing to measure your content’s popularity and ask your followers what they want.

Obtain Links

Link building is one of the oldest yet most important factors in SEO. When you have a link to your site from a third-party website, search engines view this as a “vote” for showing your site higher in search results. Therefore, the more high-quality links you have, the higher you will rank.

Link building can be time-consuming. However, it’s relatively easy to get started.

First, get your site listed in

• yellow page listings
• business directories
• local newspapers
• commerce directories
• business association listings

Then, your next step is to get blogs talking about you.

Blogs

Researching blogs relevant to your target audience and emailing them about your business and why they might be interested in writing about you may seem forward, but it is a win-win. The blogs get unique content, and you get the backlink. 🙂

Caveat Emptor: There is a right and wrong way of obtaining links. Your site can be penalised by Google if you are buying links. Remember, valuable content is the name of the game. Your social followers, for example, will share your content when it’s relevant, so initially, it may be trial and error; however, keep going as nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Summary

Not all marketing needs to drain your budget. The great thing about the Internet is that you can take a lot of action to improve your search engine rank, including adding relevant, unique content and sharing it with your social media followers. Empower you and your team to take action with some of these SEO strategies to improve your rank and drive more traffic to your site.