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When talking about marketing campaigns, SEO is one of the most important elements. Search engine optimization helps businesses get a higher rank in SERP, which means more traffic and potential customers. It’s no wonder that SEO has become a must for small businesses.
However, SEO is not cheap, and it requires a lot of time and effort to see the result. This can be a big problem for small businesses with low budgets. The thing about SEO budgeting is that your timely effort equals money. You can’t get to Google first place simply by paying for some advertising campaigns as you do in search engine marketing (SEM).
SEO strategy requires you to think about the long term, which can be a challenge for businesses with limited resources. But don’t worry. You can still do things to build a robust SEO strategy on a low budget.
Here are seven tips to build a robust SEO on a low budget:
1. Do your research
One of the most important things you need to do when it comes to SEO is to do your research. Know your target audience, know your competition, and what keywords you should rank for. This will help you focus your efforts and achieve better results.
Finding the right audience is essential, especially if you’re just starting out and have no public recognition beforehand. Make sure that you know who you’re targeting and offering your product. This can be done by examining the type of potential customers and making a buyer persona out of it.
When creating a buyer persona, you’ll need to consider:
– What are their needs?
– What are their wants?
– What are their values and priorities?
– How do they behave online?
– How can we reach them?
From there, you’ll be able to better understand how to create content and what keywords you should use. You can also use competitor analysis tools such as Moz or Ahrefs to see your competition and what they’re doing right. This will give you some ideas on how to improve your SEO strategy.
2. Optimize your website for search engines
After you’ve done your research, it’s time to optimize your website for search engines. This includes making sure that your website is SEO-friendly, your titles and meta descriptions are catchy, and your content is high quality.
One of the best ways to make your website SEO-friendly is to use keywords throughout your website. This includes your titles, meta descriptions, headings, and content. You can also use keyword density analysis tools such as SEMrush to determine how often you’re using keywords on your website.
3. Optimize images and other visual content
Visual content is important in every business to describe what the company has to offer to the customer. With visual representation, like images and product videos, visitors and the general audience can quickly grasp the brand’s message.
That’s why adding visual content is a must if you want to improve your SEO on a low budget. Using videos, for example, can help your website get discovered easily on the Google search engine. Videos have a separate section on the search result, and if you make video content, people will find your website right away.
However, you need to ensure that the visual content is optimized in order to get discovered. Add keywords in your image or video title, and do not forget to add a similar phrase on its alt text and file name. That way, Google crawlers can easily find your content and put it on its search result.
4. Improve website page speed
Another thing you can do is make sure that your website is fast and mobile-friendly. People won’t be pleased visiting a website with slow loading.
That’s why slow-speed websites often have a higher bounce rate because many won’t stay on the page if it’s not showing the content quickly. More importantly, Google now considers page speed when ranking websites, so make sure your pages are loading quickly. You can use PageSpeed Insights to test your website’s speed and get suggestions on how to improve it.
5. Build high-quality backlinks
Backlinks or inbound links are essential to ensure your website shows on Google’s first page. They are external links from other websites coming to your pages that act as a vote for Google to identify your credibility.
Make sure to build links for a page you wish to promote or land on the search engine. One of the common ways to add more external links is outreach to people who want to link back to your page.
Produce or contribute a guest post on their pages and make sure that you offer impressive content. High-quality posts are important to attract website owners to give you a free link and for readers to stay longer on your blog.
6. Improve local SEO
If you’re aiming for local exposure when starting new businesses, make sure to improve your local SEO by including your company in Google My Business. It’s a free listing from Google that allows you to put your company’s information, including website, phone number, location, photos, and many more.
Adding your business to a Google listing will help people in the local area find your product or service easily. You’ll get a higher SEO rank on the search engine when people type a keyword or phrase used to describe your business.
7. Use free SEO tools
You don’t need to worry if you have a shoestring budget to build the SEO strategy. There are plenty of SEO tools that you can use freely without spending any dollars.
Tools like Google Keyword Planner are great if you want to identify what kinds of keywords are popular now. This free tool also helps you with keyword prediction whether such phrases are getting more traffic in the coming years.
Another tool is Ahrefs Backlink Checker. It’s a free resource where you can check the backlink profile of every website. This tool is effective if you want to start a link-building technique and analyze competitors’ websites.
You can check the backlink’s quality coming to your website using Ahrefs free tools. You will also learn from your competitors and get inspired to create new content by checking their top pages with higher traffic.
Takeaway
Limited budget isn’t an excuse for small businesses not to start an SEO strategy. Compared to other marketing campaigns, SEO is, in fact, less costly and more effective in the long term.
The key to success in building a robust SEO campaign is to focus more on optimizing and improving what you have at the moment. Make sure to complete every element needed in getting an SEO score, such as finding the relevant keyword and using it strategically on your content. Free SEO tools will also help you run the campaign without worrying about cost anymore.
Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award winning explainer video company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).
Email: andre@breadnbeyond.com
