You may not believe this, but: you really don’t have to spend too much in order to get the most out of SEO. You can spend little or nothing at all but still have your site ranking on search engines and gather conversions frequently by sticking to these 10 ways to get the most out of SEO on a tight budget.
1. Take Advantage of SEO Software that Offers Free and Basic Plans
One good thing about the internet is that for every paid software out there, there is at least one similar software that offers a basic plan. Granted, the abilities of these SEO tools may not be exactly the same, but they will surely be close and will be enough to get started on SEO.
For your SEO, check out software that offers basic plans. There are quite a lot out there. But here are a few you should check out:
- Google Analytics: this is free software by Google itself that lets you observe user behavior on your site. You get to see which pages users interact with the most and pages that perform poorly. You can also link your Google Analytics account to AdSense and earn money when you begin to gather a certain number of visitors.
- Google Search Console: this is another free Google tool that is very useful if you want to get the most out of SEO on a tight budget. With this tool, you get to see how your site pages are performing, your most searched queries, and your backlinks. The tool has a lot of features that you can take advantage of to get the most out of SEO, including if your site is experiencing any usability issues. It’s usually the first go-to tool for someone with a new site looking to optimize its SEO.
- Yoast SEO: amongst bloggers, this happens to be a very popular SEO software. You can embed this software into your site as a WordPress Plugin, and the magic starts to happen from there. Yoast SEO helps your keywords stand out, so that search engines can easily index them. It also has an impact on speeding up your site, even though this effect may not be very pronounced. Yoast SEO has both free and paid plans.
- Keyword Hero: this software uses AI to help you with keywords. It shows you the phrases your customers or users use to find you on the search engines.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider: this software is a debugging tool, sort of. It crawls your website and fishes out errors with the scripts that may have an impact on reducing your ranking on search engines. It kind of just points out these errors and says: Hey, I think you should fix this. It’s very useful for those on a tight budget to improve their onsite SEO.
Take advantage of as many free SEO tools as you can.
Read: 10 Best SEO Writing Tips for Creating Great Content
2. Update Stale Content on Your Website
This should cost nothing more than your time and attention. You should know that SEO is not stale. Regularly, search engines like google update their services so that it becomes almost impossible for stale content to continue to rank.
Check out your site as often as possible for content that has grown stale, and update them. If possible, rewrite a number of articles, and include new internal links in them.
The updated articles should carry newer, better-ranking keywords. Use one of the free tools you can find to identify newer keywords that can help your site rank better and include them.
Update the media too. Replace blurry pictures with better-optimized ones. The pictures should not be too big in terms of file size, as this can slow down your site and make it less responsive.
Read: What is Local SEO? Everything You Need to Know
3. Backlink Strategies Still Work Wonders
Backlinks work like recommendations if you know exactly what to do. When a website considered an authority in a certain niche includes a backlink to your website on theirs, that is them recommending you.
For example, let’s say you are a fashion blogger. That is, stuff that appears on your site is often related to fashion. If a big website like Vouge Magazine puts up a link to your site, then you will experience a surge in traffic.
To be noticed, your goal should be recommendations. That is, get backlinks from authority sites.
Write content, and submit them to bigger websites.
The thing about bigger websites is that they are highly competitive. Like you, several other bloggers want to be published by them, so the screening process is a bit strict.
To have a better shot:
- Stick to their guidelines as much as you can.
- Be sure that all your submissions are fact-checked and free of errors.
- In articles, include links to as many other reputable sites.
- Stand out.
4. Join SEO Communities on Social Media
One of the best ways to learn about anything these days is to learn via social media communities like Quora, Facebook, and Reddit. You can get the most out of SEO from these social media communities if you’re on a tight budget.
I like social media communities so much because you find a lot of people there. You find the experts in the SEO industry like Neil Patel and Rand Fishkin, who post tips and suggestions. You find the intermediate: these ones only know so much but are very helpful. And then you find the beginners.
This gives you a sense of belonging and motivates you. Because, on SEO communities on social media, you will hear stories about big wins that will keep you going.
Also, social media seems to give the most real-time info. Long before stuff and tips start to appear on blogs, they appear on social media most of the time.
So, you will be finding out in real-time which sites rank and which ones don’t as well as new SEO trends.
Read: What SEO Strategy Entails?
5. Follow SEO Experts on Social Media
This works if you aren’t much of a community person because of the much spam that exists on social media platforms.
Follow SEO experts on Twitter. Very often, they post helpful tips that, when followed, will have your site ranking better.
Watch YouTube videos on SEO too. These have helped me quite a lot. Most YouTube videos on SEO seem a lot like watching a masterclass of some sort.
And they are free! Up your SEO game from their tips if you’re on a shoestring budget.
Read: What is Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking
6. Grab Attention With Your Social Media Pages
You may already know this, but: you can use social media to grab users’ attention, and your social media pages can bring traffic to your site.
The goal of SEO, remember, is to gather as much traffic as possible and, in the process, gather conversions.
Use all your social media accounts in your favor to reach more audiences.
Facebook pages, when handled properly, can draw traffic to you. Take out time to design your Facebook pages. Make these pages as engaging as possible, and front them.
You can have some influencers front the page for you—just a couple of reposts, and you are good.
Ah! And yes, just as you fix old content, fix broken backlinks so that there will be much fewer 404 errors on your website. Backlink strategy, in addition to social media, does a huge job of helping your site rank.
7. Follow New Google Algorithm Updates and Implement Changes
When you read this title, what came to mind? If you are like me, then the word was: research. Yes, tons of research. It is kind of the little price you pay for free SEO tips that really work.
Since you aren’t paying software or experts to do it for you, you have to spend a lot of time researching new algorithm updates.
You can subscribe to the Google Search Central Blog RSS feed to get new updates in the search engine world.
Search Engine Roundtable also does a great job of giving great information about what happened in the search forums through its eye. You will get top SEO information from Barry Schwartz, an expert in the SEO industry.
Read Google announcements as often as you can. Follow them on all social media handles. Social media forums also come in handy here. As I mentioned earlier, someone always knows something about the Google algorithm and is willing to share it.
Implement these new changes on your website as soon as you know about them.
Read: 10 Best SEO Techniques to Double Your Search Traffic
8. Make Your Site More Responsive
The old trick still works and will keep working. A non-responsive site does not do well with SEO. The reason is simple. Users don’t like them. Even worse, search engines don’t like them. So that is two against one, and the site barely stands a chance.
To make your site responsive, you will start by making sure the scripts are in order and that the theme is responsive. You can use a free SEO tool to debug your site, so you can fetch out scripts that are not responsive and fix them.
You can also ensure that your site is hosted by a fast server or hosting platform.
Remove all plugins that are clogging your site. Stick to using plugins that are frequently updated and are using the latest WordPress version.
Also, enable lazy-loading of your site media, take off all pictures that are too big, or reduce their sizes. I mentioned this earlier. Take off all media that are too big, even. They are slowing down your site.
Optimize your site for mobile. Mobile users convert quite a lot. These are simple SEO strategies you can utilize when on a tight budget.
9. Title Your Works Properly
It is possible that the titles of your works are making it hard for search engines to find them.
So, pay attention to titles. The title of articles. The titles and descriptions of pictures. The title of your posts and the URL itself.
Also, pay attention to subtitles. The subtitles decide whether visitors will want to keep reading or if they’ll just scroll past and leave.
The trick is: that the title of your works should carry the necessary keywords. One of the software I mentioned can be used to search for and observe the ranking keywords to be included in your works.
Read: Writing with Clarity: 10 Tips for Simplifying Your Message
10. Hire Serpcore
Serpcore has been in the game for quite some time and has helped one too many small businesses, startups, and bloggers improve their ranks. I include us as one of the ways to get the most out of SEO on a tight budget here because, with us—Serpcore, you don’t have to spend much to get the best of SEO services.
Our SEO services include the following:
- SEO onsite optimizations
- SEO off-page
- Competitive analysis
- Web Design
- Content Strategy
- SEO Guidance
All you have to do is reach out to us via this mail: contact@serpcoret.com, and we will respond. Alternatively, you can schedule a 15 minutes discovery call with us. We will find ways for you to get the most out of SEO on a tight budget.
