SEO on a Budget: Simple Strategies that Work

Search engine optimization can have a relatively low cost for a high ROI, but sometimes there is no budget at all to spend on tools and software. Here’s four basic SEO improvements you can make to your site on your own (though they will take time and effort to do correctly).

Tip #1 Keyword Research

If you’ve researched SEO to any extent, you’ve definitely heard the importance of keyword research lecture. Though this topic has been written about to ad nauseam, it’s still an extremely vital part of SEO. Keyword research can show you what your customers are looking for. The language customers search with can give away valuable information such as the searchers’ level of expertise and how far down in the conversion funnel they are. As you are researching, you will notice how the keywords will start to naturally fall into groups. These groups will inform you of ways to organize and improve your current pages as well as identify new pages that you should create.

Keyword research tools help you quickly identify relevant search terms to target. Larger keyword research tools can come a hefty monthly or yearly price tag, but don’t fret if you are doing small business SEO on a limited marketing budget. There many free keyword research tools to out there to help you kickstart your SEO today.

Tip #2 Optimize Compelling Meta Tags

Optimizing your title tags and meta descriptions is a free and easy way to quickly improve your SEO. While your meta data doesn’t directly impact your website’s rank, it can help improve your site’s click-through rate in the search engine results. Use this opportunity to stand out from other search results because this may be the first impression many customers have of your site. Your title tags and meta description should entice searchers to click on your link and inform them what they will find if they do. Follow our guideline on how to stand out in the search results and increase click-through rate.

Tip #3 Create and Optimize Great Content

Your website’s content is what provides value to visitors. Content answers user queries, helps them discover related information, and builds trust. This can lead to the sharing of your content, lead generation, or an increase in conversions. All great things, right?

Content is also great for SEO. It would be difficult, if not impossible in most cases, to rank well for keywords that aren’t framed in informative or valuable content. Web crawlers can read your page’s content to determine if it matches search, meaning, if it would be useful to searchers. This is why it is so important to create well-written, informative, and unique content. Use your expertise and the keywords you found during your research to increase the relevancy of your content and optimize for search engines. To improve content even further, structure the content with appropriate title tags to improve user experience and help crawlers better understand the content.

Tip #4 Optimize Your Site Structure

Your site structure is the organization of your website’s content. Though organizing a site yourself is a bit of a manual task, an organized structure is valuable to your site in several ways. A well-organized site will improve your website’s user experience because a structured navigation will help customers find answers or products quickly and efficiently. Your site’s internal link structure (created by site structure) will also help show Google which pages of your site are the most important, the pages you want to rank highest in the search engines. Internal links pointing from subcategories to categories, for example, tells Google that your category pages are more important. This will help prevent your pages from competing with each other in the search results. Check out this guide from Reliablesoft on improving your site structure.

Continue to Improve

Improve your SEO today by following these tips. Continue to work to make your site more valuable to searchers and you will see your rankings improve and your organic traffic increase. Once you get the basics down, try using one of the many free SEO tools out there to further improve your site.