How to Devise a Successful SEO Strategy Even When On a Limited Budget
Small businesses tend to be overwhelmed by search engine optimization largely due to the technicalities involved. The process also seems to be intimidating for them as there is a general perception that SEO is very expensive to implement and is beyond the budgets of small businesses.
While it is true large businesses may have an edge due to their huge exposure and experience of the online world and also due to the availability of substantially larger budgets, there is no need for small businesses to despair as there are quite a few techniques that they can employ to boost their SEO without spending a great deal of money.
Achieving Big SEO ROI with Small Spends
When there is a need to develop an SEO strategy on a small budget, both time and resources available must be put to good use and in an efficient way. The efficacy of the SEO efforts will depend on how creative you are and the extent to which you can keep your efforts focused to yield the best possible results.
It can be quite simple to get lost in the host of technicalities that comprises SEO; however, if you can cut across them and concentrate on specific actions, you will be able to give your SEO a big boost. Some proven tips of building a robust SEO strategy with a small budget:
SEO Strategy: Emphasize On Long-Tail Keywords
Every user, without exceptions, wants search engines to deliver the best answers to their queries in the shortest possible time. To make that possible, small businesses should figure out how their users are framing their questions and craft long-tail keywords to match them as closely as possible so that the search engines have no difficulty at all in identifying your site as the most likely to satisfy the user query.
Long-tail keywords tend to be extremely specific and longer than their generic counterparts and as a result, they are more accurate too.
Some of the other SEO strategy benefits associated with long-tail keywords include lower competition relative to generic keywords, and a greater degree of focus and relevance to online searches. Due to this, one usually is able to get a higher conversion rate than that obtained from general keywords despite their much lower traffic.
The principal reason why long-tail keywords deliver better results is because Google’s algorithms have continuously evolved to deliver results that are more in line with the specific search queries of users,observes the marketing head of one of the leading bulk email marketing services Mumbai.
SEO Strategy: Encourage Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a proven way of boosting your SEO because you are able to share content with a fresh audience and backlink generation is made easier. While there has been a fair amount of debate on the utility of guest blogging, it can still be extremely valuable as long as the poor quality content is not spammed to sites with low authority.
While being effective in boosting SEO, blogging involves a substantial investment of time and effort in researching your industry to discover websites that are open to accepting guest blog posts. Then you have to produce content that is really valuable and fresh that the users of those sites will like.
Once you have content ready, you will need to contact the blog editors and persuade them to publish your content and then keep in constant touch with them to nurture that relationship.
The approach to guest blogging is to provide value to users and increase your domain authority with the backlinks generated.
SEO Strategy: Optimize For Local Visibility
Even though it may be a grand dream to achieve top ranks on a national basis, you need to appreciate that such an objective needs to be fuelled with a lot of time, energy, and money. It is simply not possible for small businesses working on a tight budget to achieve the sort of SEO large companies do by spending millions of dollars.
Rather, you would do better by focusing your SEO efforts to generate conversions from the local audience – usually, you will be able to achieve tangible results far more quickly and with a far better return on investment.
The first step in going local is to open a Google My Business account and populate it with accurate name, address, phone (NAP) data so that users firing off queries to find local businesses to satisfy their requirements will see your site in their top results.
Repeat the process for other leading search engines like Bing and Yahoo. Make it a point to upload pictures of your business and also include local reviews that certify that your business is genuine.
Conclusion
The best practices governing search engine optimization are constantly evolving. It is because the industry is so dynamic that even small businesses can build an SEO strategy that delivers results as effectively as larger businesses with very deep pockets.
Small businesses need to keep their focus on knowing what the user wants and then undertaking a series of actions to deliver focused and relevant content to local users with finely-honed long-tail keywords, and local SEO techniques that make the businesses more discoverable by the search engines.