How much should you spend on SEO as a small business?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is crucial for online businesses that are seeking to grow their online visibility. Through an effective SEO strategy, businesses can increase their organic traffic and generate leads and sales without investing too heavily in paid advertising. But will implementing an SEO strategy be viable for a small business with a limited budget? 

In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into the costs of SEO and how small businesses can implement a viable SEO strategy without breaking the bank.

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Keyword Research

Enriching your content with keywords is an essential element of SEO that ensures your website will appear when users search for words or phrases in your niche. While popular keyword research tools such as SEMRush do cost money (between $130 - $500 per month), there are free keyword tools available online that you can utilise to get a good foundation of keywords to inject into your content.

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On-Page Optimisation

Ensuring that your website is responsive across mobile and desktop, has a fast load speed and relevant meta tags are just a few of the elements included in on-page SEO optimisation. If you don’t have web development expertise, you can use affordable gig sites like Upwork, Airtasker and Fiverr to help optimise the on-page elements of your website to give your SEO a boost. 

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Local SEO

In order to build up your online presence among potential customers in your area, you can implement free local SEO strategies like claiming your Google My Business listing, submitting your website to local business listing websites and encouraging your existing/previous customers to leave positive reviews. The good news is that all of this is free. 

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Content Marketing

You can help to build up your website’s EAT (Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness) score by regularly producing high-quality and informative content for your target audience. This won’t cost you anything! If you aren’t the strongest writer, you can also rely on free tools such as Hemingway, WordPress’s Yoast tool, Grammarly, and ChatGPT to help tighten up your readability. (Beware, you might not want to rely on ChatGPT too heavily for SEO.)

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Backlinking

Building up a solid portfolio of reputable, do-follow backlinks will be pivotal in building up your domain authority and eventually ranking on page one of Google for relevant search terms. If you’re looking to build your backlinks on a budget, strap in, as this will be a slightly lengthy process. Start by using free backlink checker tools online, insert your competitors’ websites, and find out who they are receiving links from. Then, construct an email asking if you can contribute a free guest post to their website with a do-follow link. Ideally, you’ll tailor each email so that they don’t seem like spam or something that you’ve sent out 100 times. 

Eventually, you’ll get a few businesses who will be willing to accept your guest post, and simply insert a link to your website somewhere within the post and you’ll gain domain authority! 

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Social Media 

While you won’t get too much of an SEO boost from social media, it’s important to have a strong presence across all platforms, sharing informative content and linking back to your website when possible. The more online exposure you get, the better - and it’s free, so what’s the harm? 

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Conclusion

You can implement all of these strategies while spending very little, and over time you will see improvements in your domain authority and ranking across a range of keywords - increasing your online exposure to your target audience and hopefully getting you more leads! However, SEO takes time, and to implement all of these strategies consistently will require a lot of work, which is why most companies eventually outsource their SEO or hire a dedicated SEO specialist to focus solely on building their organic presence. 

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Need Help?

Ready to boost your website's visibility and attract more organic traffic? Look no further! Get in touch with our Affordable SEO Agency today and let us help you optimize your website for better search engine rankings. Don't miss out on potential customers - take the first step towards success with our expert SEO services!

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