Affordable SEO: 5 Ways to Cut Costs and Get Traffic

SEO is incredibly useful – but it is not always cheap. While we recommend hiring experts, here are the 5 best affordable SEO tips to help you get started.

Sure, you can hire someone from Fiverr to create thousands of comment spam, web 2.0, or forum links to your website for $5 to $20. But that’s not affordable SEO, that’s digital marketing suicide.

On the other hand, hiring real and experienced SEO experts can leave a huge dent in your business’ finances. So what is a business and website owner to do?

1. Publish High Quality, Long-Form Content

If your articles, blog posts and other pages don’t get past the 500-word mark, you are putting your business and website at a disadvantage.

A 2012 study involving 20,000 keywords found that the average length of the top 10 results is 2,000 words. And, for the number one spot? The average number of words is about 20% higher, at 2,416 words.

That’s a far cry from the short and generic articles one often sees in low-quality websites.

But just as convincing was the hint from Google’s Pandu Nayak, technical staff member and the man behind the Panda update:

“Users often turn to Google to answer a quick question, but research suggests that up to 10% of users’ daily information needs involve learning about a broad topic. That’s why today we’re introducing new search results to help users find in-depth articles.”

If you want your site to rank in the search engines and get the traffic it deserves, you need to create in-depth and informative content that answers the reader’s most pressing question.

But please don’t sacrifice quality just to reach a certain word count – or readers might hate you for it!

2. Up Your On-Page SEO

External (off-page) factors often take the spotlight when people talk about search engine optimization. But while links, social interactions, and other outside signals are important for rankings, one cannot ignore the role played by on-page SEO.

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages – their content and HTML source code especially – to rank higher in the SERPs and earn more traffic.

If that sounds complicated, fear not! On-page SEO isn’t rocket science, and you can cover your bases with the simple tips below:

1. Title: The title tag should capture what the page is about. For best results, include the target keyword, make sure it reads well, and keep the title down to 70 characters or less.
2. Description: A page’s description doesn’t count for rankings, but it’s not useless. The description can make a huge difference in the click-through rate (CTR) so keep it relevant and optimized.
3. SEO And User-Friendly URLs: Keep your URLs short and easy to read. Include your primary keyword without looking like spam so readers have a better idea what’s on the page before they click.
4. Keyword Frequency: Google may not use keyword density, but they do look at the number of times a keyword appears on a piece of content. So use the target phrase a couple of times in the body of your post.

3. Pass SEO Juice To Other Pages With Internal Linking

Internal linking, which refers to any links from one page in a domain to another page in the same domain, is an essential SEO tactic you shouldn’t ignore.

Through internal linking, website owners can draw the attention of Google and visitors to a particular page – and this brings a host of benefits for SEO and beyond.

For starters, linking to other pages within your website gives visitors more reading options and more reasons to stay. This decreases your site’s bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who navigate away from a blog or site after viewing a page).

Even better, internal linking can help Google index pages more efficiently and improve your site’s ranking for certain keywords.

The link in the first paragraph of this section (for example) sends a clear signal to Google that the page is relevant for the keyword “essential SEO.” Not to mention it passes page authority and SEO juice to the page being linked to.

4. Please The Eyes Of Google With A Responsive Design

Fact: More Google searches are carried out on tablets, smartphones, and other mobile devices than on desktop computers.

Google always puts user experience and satisfaction first, and it’s not surprising that the big G now uses responsiveness as a ranking factor in its algorithm.

Think about it:

If you searched for “DUI lawyer in Florida” using your phone and the results you got are pages with poor formatting, overlapping images, and illegible blocks of text, you will feel frustrated at Google, won’t you?

Unlike static and unresponsive pages, responsive web design uses CSS style sheets, adjustable images, and proportion-based grids to adjust a site’s content and layout depending on the device.

The result: a smooth browsing and reading experience for both mobile and desktop users – exactly what Google wants!

5. Improve Your Site Page Speed And Get More Search Engine Love

Google hearts websites that load fast. In 2010, the search engine giant introduced site speed as a new ranking signal – and it makes perfect sense especially from the searcher’s point of view.

“Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there,” says Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts in their announcement.

So when doing a full site audit, keep your eyes peeled for opportunities to increase your site speed.

Do you use a lot of images in your posts and pages? If you do, make sure to compress them. If you’re using a platform like WordPress, try to get rid of add-ons and plugins you don’t use. And please, steer clear from Javascript and dense lines of code as much as possible!

Start With The Affordable SEO Practices Above, We’ll Help You With The Rest

Proper SEO is not cheap, but it shouldn’t leave your business in debt.

We just looked at five optimization tactics that can take a website from zero to hero. And the best part, they hardly cost any money and you can get started right away!

Of course, getting better rankings take more than a fast and responsive website design, long-form content, and well-written title tags and descriptions. But you’d do best to focus on the basics first.

And when the time comes to take your digital marketing beyond the basics, know that we’re just an email away!