Did you know your website can rank higher in search results even with a small budget? Indeed, you don’t need to spend up large 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 content on your website and keywords to take control of where your site is positioning in organic search results.
Your business can get more website traffic without spending thousands every month 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 all things in life, you need to be in the know, so let’s start with which SEO strategies you can implement without spending up large every month.
Utilize Free SEO Tools
SEO can be complicated, but luckily, there are many free tools to 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 for the get-go so search engines can use their bots or spiders to crawl your site and index every page. Even if you have minimal SEO experience, the 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 assist 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 optimizing 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 merely “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 you’re going to focus on, you need to start including them in 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 analyzing 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 just because you have new content.
The content has to be high quality, relevant to your audience, and unique. The more content you post that is valuable to people searching for your targeted keywords, the better you will rank. With this SEO strategy, you are in full control.
If you’re writing the content, make sure you have learned how to contribute content that 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
Then, your next step is to getting blogs talking about you.
Researching blogs relevant to your target audience and sending them an email 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 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.
