As a small business, finding affordable SEO can seem difficult. You may have already emailed a number of companies, received quotes and been somewhat shocked at the price.
The difficulty is, unless you know exactly what you’re doing, there’s not much of an alternative. Well, there are some things you can do. Let us help!
Why not try these free quick fixes now, before you are properly ready to invest in affordable Search Engine Optimisation.
1) Carry out a quick audit
In order to reach your end goal, you have to know where you are currently. You can do this in a number of ways. Firstly, you can use the free variants of tools such as SpyFu, SEM Rush or even Website Grader from Hubspot. These tools enable you to understand approximately where you’re at, with some simple tips and pointers. You can even have a sneaky peak at what some of your competitors are up to – invaluable to help you eat up some of that SEO-based market share. There are paid options available with both SpyFu and SEM Rush, but the free functionality is sufficient if you want to do things cheaply.
2) Check your PageSpeed Insights
Seeing as it’s mostly Google people use to search nowadays, it makes sense to use them as the golden standard. PageSpeed Insights enables you to quickly and easily grade your website on both desktop and mobile devices. This simple tool then suggests some fixes you can make, in order to make further improvements to how quickly your webpages load. If your site is deemed to be horrible by this tool, there’s a fair chance your results may not be showing as high as they should be.
3) Conduct keyword research and check popular searches versus terms you use
Regardless of your SEO knowledge, if for example you’re an estate agency in Bedford, you may wish to research how often this term is searched for, as well as any close variations, to decide on which terms you should be aiming for. If ‘Bedford estate agents’ has 200 searches per month, versus 100 for ‘estate agency Bedford’, then it’s quite clear which you should be picking, right? A tool such as Ubersuggest can help with this. It shows localised data for your search terms, as well as suggesting a plethora of variations. A very powerful affordable SEO tip.
4) Optimise page titles, images, image alt tags and more
Once you’ve found your keywords, you need to optimise your on-page content to match them, as closely as possible. The key here is not to stuff a bunch of random words in, but to keep things quality. Create tailored landing pages if you need to use multiple strong-ranking keywords – this is often best practice anyway, as it is more likely to encourage a conversion on the basis you’re actually providing the closest possible match to the person’s search term. SEO professionals will often suggest optimising page titles, image titles, image alt tags and meta descriptions at the very least to focus around search terms/keywords. This is the strongest possible exposure you’re going to gain in terms of algorithms, and it’s one of the few parts that are free (if you know what you’re doing – best to leave it to web development professionals if not).
5) List your website on free directories
SEO is split into on-page and off-page. On-page is what you do on your own site, off-page is what is done on other external websites. Both are important, and you really need to do both in a combined, smooth and methodical manner. A very simple way to create backlinks to your own site is through free web directories, such as Yell. Not only does this generate a level of authority for your site, it also enables you to advertise your services to a site which is guaranteed to have a lot more traffic than your own – for the time being at least.
