Just starting out or looking to cut costs? While a lot of digital marketing channels will cost you money, you should aim to understand how to save money with SEO from day one.
How to Save Money on SEO: In-Depth Guide
In this guide, we will explore proven methods and techniques to help you save money while optimizing your online presence through SEO.
If you follow these expert tips, you can increase your website’s visibility; drive organic traffic and leads; and reduce your overall marketing expenses.
SEO Basics
Understanding SEO and How It Works
Before getting into the specifics of how to save money with SEO, let’s be sure you have a solid understanding of what SEO is and how it works.
Assuming you’re new to the concept, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
SEO includes anything you do to boost where your website ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs). This, in turn, will drive larger amounts of organic traffic to your site.
Key Items That Influence Success: The Three Pillars of SEO
While there are innumerable smaller factors involved in ranking a website, you should focus the bulk of your time on some of the bigger types of activities.
I refer to these as the “Three Pillars” of SEO. Here are the three, and what each pillar entails within your overall SEO efforts:
- On Page SEO: Quality of content, Relevance of keywords, On-page Optimization
- Off Page / Off Site SEO: Your Domain Authority and link profile, Social Media
- Technical SEO: Website speed and performance, Mobile-friendliness, Website Architecture, User Experience
On-Page SEO Tips
Little tweaks on your website can make a big difference in boosting your search engine rankings.
By focusing on on-page SEO, you can improve your website’s visibility and drive more organic traffic to your site.
Here are some necessary steps to enhance your on-page optimization:
- Perform in-depth research to identify keywords that are very relevant to you and your target audience, highly searched, and less competitive to rank for
- Optimize your meta tags, including title tags and meta descriptions, with relevant keywords
- Create high-quality, engaging content that is optimized for both users and search engines
- Use descriptive URLs and optimize your images with alt text to improve accessibility and SEO
- Implement internal linking strategies to help search engines crawl and index your website more effectively
If you manage to get all of these steps right, you’ll see improvements in your overall organic search performance over time.
Enhancing Your Site Structure for Better Indexing
Site structure plays an important role in how search engines crawl and index your website.
Always organize your content logically, and be sure your navigation is super intuitive and easy-to-use.
These steps will help you improve the user experience (UX) and help search engines understand the key topic for each page.
To enhance your site structure further, create an XML sitemap and submit it to search engines to help them discover and index your pages more efficiently.
And as I mentioned above, don’t overlook your internal linking structure. It matters a lot for guiding users and search engines to the most important pages on your website.
Off-Page SEO Strategies
Quality Backlinks
If you want to build your domain authority, you will need off-page SEO, specifically, high-quality backlinks.
Even though it may take time and effort, high-quality backlinks from reputable websites is the only way to succeed with boosting authority.
Focus on obtaining backlinks from websites that are relevant to your industry and have a strong domain authority of their own.
Some of the most common tactics include guest posting, collaborations, niche edits / link insertions, and creating shareable content that naturally attracts backlinks.
How Social Media Benefits SEO
Although it does not provide a direct impact on domain authority, social media should be a key part of any well-rounded off-page SEO effort.
Social signals, such as likes, shares, and comments, can have an indirect impact your search engine rankings.
By actively engaging with your audience on social media and sharing your content, you can improve brand awareness and attract more visitors to your site.
And if the content is good enough, those new visitors very well may choose to link to your content from their own domains.
Additionally, social media profiles often rank high in search engine results, providing you with an opportunity to control more real estate on the SERPs.
You’ll also want to optimize your social profiles with relevant keywords, of course. Include a link to your website if that feature is available.
Be sure to mix in third party content to keep your social presence dynamic and less self-promotional.
And get involved in conversations with friends and followers to build relationships and further grow your engaged audience.
Technical SEO
Improve Site Speed to Boost Rankings
According to BigCommerce, even a one-second delay in page load time can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions.
Site speed is a critical factor in not only user experience but also in search engine rankings.
We have covered page load time optimization in the past.
Nonetheless, you’ll want to take actions like the following to improve performace:
- Optimize images
- Deploy browser caching
- Minimize server response time
- Reduce unnecessary redirects
Mobile Optimization and Its Impact on SEO
Even in this mobile-first era, many websites still neglect the importance of mobile optimization.
With more searches happening on mobile devices than on desktops, search engines favor mobile-friendly websites in their rankings.
To ensure your website is mobile-friendly, use responsive design and don’t overlook performance. We mentioned above how important load times are, but that goes double for mobile visitors.
Google will continue to prioritize mobile-first indexing. This is no trend, but a new way we all have to line up behind to succeed on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Monitoring and Maintenance
How to Track Your SEO Progress
No marketing strategy is complete without a predetermined goal and measurement plan. And SEO is no different.
After you set specific goals and KPIs, you can use tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, ahrefs, RavenTools, and Moz to monitor your progress.
These tools provide valuable insights into your organic traffic, keyword rankings, and user behavior.
With this information on hand, you can make data-driven decisions and adjust as needed to get back on track.
Why Regular SEO Audits Help Save Money
The better your website works as intended, the more likely you are to do well with driving organic traffic.
The SEO Audit is one of the most powerful tools in our arsenal. By auditing your website, you can identify problematic areas that can hinder your SEO progress.
A typical audit will include data points such as:
- Broken internal and external links
- Broken images
- Page Title issues (too long, too short, missing, duplicate)
- Meta Description issues (too long, too short, missing, duplicate)
- Duplicate or Shallow Content
- URL Structure issues
- HTTPS problems
- Overall performance and Core Web Vitals
- Mobile Readiness / Friendliness
- Redirect chains or overuse of redirects (which can also impact performance)
- Technical SEO Add-Ons like robots.txt, XML Sitemap, and other robots directives
Every single one of these can squash your efforts in other areas if left unfixed.
Make regular SEO audits a part of your quarterly maintenance routine to ensure your website stays optimized for search engines.
Advanced Tips on How to Save Money with SEO
Schema Markup for Better Visibility
More advanced SEO experts should already understand semantic SEO. However, far too many digital marketers still fail to understand schema markup, which is important for semantic search.
By weaving structured data into your HTML, search engines can better understand the content on your website.
This, in turn, can get you better placement in maps, rich snippets, FAQs, and other knowledge graph content.
With this additional visibility, you’re likely to be found by a larger number of relevant online searches.
I always say, get a leg up where opportunity presents itself. The potential upside is worth the up-front effort.
And it’s a whole lot less expensive than paying for visitors via PPC.
The Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in SEO
AI is the driving force behind many of the modern search engine algorithms.
In fact, Google has employed some type of machine learning since at least 2013 when they launched their Hummingbird update.
Now that search engines are serving up SERPs based on user intent, they will continue to expand these capabilities.
This is further proof of why you need to take semantic SEO seriously. And if you still haven’t shifted focus to clusters of keywords and topics, make the change today.
Conclusion: Now You Know How to Save Money With SEO
If you follow this guide on how to save money with SEO, you’ll be able to continue growing your organic traffic without breaking the bank.
Not only can you grown organic traffic, but you can also save money on paid advertising. It pays off in multiple ways.
But you have to adopt the right mindset to avoid hasty decision making.
SEO is a long-term investment that requires patience and consistent effort. Stick with it, and you’ll be happy you did.
Feature Image Credit (CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED): User 401(K) 2012 on flickr.com
Tommy Landry
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