Here is what digital marketers feel about SEO. Search engine optimization has changed dramatically over the years. These days, most businesses comprehend the basic concepts of SEO and why it is important. However, when it comes to developing and executing a sound SEO strategy for your brand, just creating content for the keywords your customers are searching for is just time-consuming and not how it is supposed to be. So what is a good strategy then?
SEO strategy is the system of organizing a website’s content by topic, which helps major search engines like Google; understand a user’s intent when searching. By optimizing a web page around important topics, then keywords within that topic, you can increase your expertise in the eyes of a search engine and rank well for long-tail keywords related to that topic.
Yes, the SEO part can be a bit overwhelming to many small businesses and startups. This aspect of online marketing can be even more challenging when businesses have a tight marketing budget and can’t just splash money all-around at your marketing strategy as your largest competitors can.
It is expected to get overwhelmed with the details and complexities of a large SEO strategy. For example blogging, branding, backlinking, local SEO, and many more are all important aspects of a business plan, but they also take a lot of knowledge and experience to run efficiently. Therefore instead of getting surrounded in the forest of information, let’s focus on specific actions you can take to expand your online presence with a small and realistic SEO budget.
1. SET REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS
The key to a successful strategy when working with limited budgets is setting expectations. It is important to differentiate between realistic and unrealistic visions and goals in terms of SEO. The client may have huge visions of what they expect SEO to achieve for them. They might not be feasible. Research and have an idea for the baseline of organic traffic currently going to your website. Evaluate outreach campaigns and redesign the structure of the website.
A significant factor in developing an overall performing organic strategy on a limited budget is knowing where you can put your energy to achieve the most growth. You may need to look at what your focus product, service, or content is. Prioritize the pages or goals that are most important.
Understand the basic concept that you will achieve more for those one or two pages than if you are trying to spread your limited budget across your whole website. Does that make sense?
2. PRIORITIZE RESULTS FIRSTHAND
It seems to be a quite tempting situation to find how to drive traffic in the fastest way, such as going for a long-tail keyword strategy. However, this might not be the best utilization of your budget if it does not bring about conversions. This comes back to the point above, setting expectations correctly. If you accept the fact that conversions are one of your key aspects for showing success then a long-tail keyword strategy in isolation may not be the further best course of action.
3. THINK LIKE THERE IS NO BOX
With a constrained budget in a fully crowded industry, you will need to act smart with how you spend your resources. Google’s standard organic results might not be your best starting point. Sounds very counter-intuitive? If your product is visually appealing, then consider focusing on ranking your images for image searches and carousels. This could bring in converting traffic to your site easier than if you are trying to rank for head terms associated with your product.
4. DO SWOT ANALYSIS ON YOUR COMPETITORS
A good way of being innovative, quick, and saving resources is to look at what your competitors are already doing. Do a mind SWOT analysis and try to find out where they are getting their backlinks from. See if any of those sites are worth approaching for your links. Try to understand how their copy is out-ranking yours and use that knowledge to improve your own.
5. REDEFINE EXISTING CONTENT BEFORE PENNING NEW
And to conclude, the smart suggestion for making the most of your limited budget when creating a winning SEO strategy is to improve the content that already exists on your site. So what can you optimize that is already on your site? Think about videos, images, and audio files. Dive into the schema markup available for the content. This can aid in a presentation in the SERPs which may gain you more visibility without having to spend more financial resources on your new content.
