It can be quite tough to compete online with your competitors if they have lots more budget than you, after all – if you’re a small business on a budget and they have high profile SEO agencies and online marketing professionals on their side – you might even feel like giving up.
Because of this, it is important to try and find techniques that you can utilise with any budget – or even without a budget, whether that budget is big or small. This means that the only things these SEO tips will be costing you – is time and effort. Something we can all spare at some point in the day.
This article will aim to give you some tips that you can use no matter what your budget is.
Find Wasted Link Equity on your Website
You want to make sure that you’re utilising as much of your link equity as possible, particularly you you’re working to a small budget and can’t consistently build new links. A neat little technique you can use here is to find where your internal link equity may be wasted a bit.
Start by running a crawler such as Screaming Frog across your website. When it is finished, go to the response codes section and look for any 302 redirects. If you find them, check to see if they are meant to be 302 (temporary) redirects or if they should be permanent. If they are meant to be permanent, then make sure you change them to a 301 so that they pass as much link equity as possible. Better still, change the link so that rather than going via a redirect, they link directly to the target page.
Give Internships to Local Students
Quite often, students at your local college or University will be looking for work over the summer or non-term time. You can try and hire some of these and get them to work on your SEO campaign. There are a few ways you can utilize them and use their skills, such as:
- Writing content for your website
- Finding link building targets and getting contact details
- Outreaching to people via email or phone
- Running your social media channels like Facebook or Twitter
There are probably loads of things you can think of. You can also be quite creative depending on your niche too. For example if you operate in the fashion niche, you could try to work with fashion students.
Offer Guest Posts to Related Blogs
This one doesn’t have to cost you any money but it can take a bit of your time. You can spend some time researching good quality, relevant blogs in your niche, then contacting them to see if they will accept a guest post from you.
If they say yes, you can then write the article for them and send it over. This can contain a link back to your website. This can be a very low cost way to build good quality links to your website. It can also be a great way of building relationships with bloggers in your niche too.
Sort Out Your Server
Ensure your server is working properly and working well. All this SEO work you’re working so hard for isn’t going to be any use if your audience can’t even load the website because it keeps crashing. You can compare different servers and hosting agents on comparison websites like www.WhoIsHostingThis.com and find the right one to fit your niche and the kind of industry your website is in too. Read through reviews and compare the different providers – and then watch as your website performs better, and the user experience becomes better – eventually improving SEO.