Managing your SEO can become costly very quickly, especially if you are trying to see results fast. However, if you own a small business, you might not have the ability to spend thousands of dollars managing your SEO. Hearing stories about other businesses spending large sums of money on their SEO can be demoralizing. If you are working with a small budget, it is still possible to see success with your SEO. The most important thing is learning how to prioritize and work on the aspects of SEO that have the highest return for the amount of money being spent.
To help you find this balance, we are going to look at some tips that will help you manage your SEO better, no matter how small your budget is.
Fix Obvious Issues First
Fixing obvious problems first is a great way to ensure you are starting your SEO management at your strongest. All the hard work you put in will be wasted if your website and other channels you use for SEO have serious issues. For example, your website might have serious technical issues or lots of backlinks to pages that no longer exist.
To find out which issues might come back to haunt you in the future, a comprehensive audit is advised. Although it might seem like you are wasting what little time and money you have, a comprehensive audit puts you in a better position to know what needs urgent attention and what can be taken care of when additional funds become available.
Look for Free or Cheaper Alternative Tools
One of the main gaps left by a small budget when doing SEO is the lack of proper tools. Tools to do things like backlink identification, keyword research, or tracking your rank can cost a lot of money. If you do not have the money to spend on all these tools, you can opt for free or cheaper alternatives. Although many of these alternatives will give you roughly the same results, they may not have as many options or the automation that comes with the paid tools.
Reuse Old Content
Reusing old content is one of the best ways to refresh your website but it is also a great alternative when you do not have the budget for the research and writing of new content. Refreshing old content only requires a bit of research to add to the content that already exists on a website. Additionally, it takes less time, which matters if you pay your copywriters at an hourly rate.
Refreshing old content can be done in-house without requiring costly external services and can help improve the amount of professional content you have to post to the website once the refresh is done.
Make Better Use of Your Team
When you have a small budget and require SEO tasks to be completed fast, making better use of your team can help you hit your goals within the budget you do have. To do this, you need to find out what everyone’s strengths are. Some people may prefer to write while others may be proficient in handling the technical aspects of SEO.
Making use of everyone’s strengths like this is especially useful when you do not have the tools to automate these tasks. It is also a great way to boost morale and ensure all the tasks you have in the queue are completed on time.
Set Expectations
Setting expectations is critical when working with a small budget. This is because the small budget might not allow you to achieve everything you want to or see the results you are looking for. Although your client or manager might have expectations about the results they would like to see, that might be unrealistic in the context of your budget’s size.
The best way to manage expectations is to have a baseline measurement of where you currently stand and then use predictive models to estimate where you might be in a few weeks or months. Anything outside the results of the predictive models is unrealistic and is unlikely to be achieved within the budget and timeframe set.
Work With Manageable Targets
When on a small budget, you might not be able to hit every target on your list. Instead, try to narrow down your targets to a few things that you can achieve using the budget you have. With a smaller budget, you are likely to be more successful if you set just a few manageable goals.
Also, when narrowing down your list, ensure that you leave the targets that require little money and that have a high return on investment. For example, optimizing for mobile is relatively cheap and because of the increasing use of mobile devices to search for business, products, and services, focusing on this goal will yield a massive return on investment.
Prioritize Results
You already know what results you want to see out of your SEO strategy and efforts. The question to ask is, which of these results are important to you. For example, bringing in traffic is good but converting visitors, no matter how many or how few there are, might be better for the business or client.
Your key metrics for the measurement of success should be the priority before you start considering other results.
Use Unconventional Strategies
If you are in a crowded industry, you need to consider unconventional strategies. For example, depending on your business, you might need to veer away from trying to rank on the first page of search engine results. While this might seem counterintuitive if your business relies on people seeing your products, would it not be better to try to have your images appear on image search results?
Having a limited budget for your SEO might seem like a limiting factor, but there are different ways to work with a smaller budget to see amazing results. It might require that you change your approach to SEO, make better use of the limited resources available to you and think outside the box.