7 Affordable SEO Tips to Increase Website Traffic
Search engine optimization… It sounds like a mouthful but it’s not something that should keep you awake at night. Rather, it’s most definitely your friend. Go Florida SEO is your ultimate source for affordable SEO.
In 2020 alone, Google has conducted over three trillion searches. SEO helps you become a part of those three trillion hits.
And here’s the best news of all. Affordable SEO is multi-faceted. You can tackle what you will and consult the experts with what you won’t.
Much of an SEO strategy can be implemented without spending a dime. Keywords can be added, content can be tweaked, and social media can be amped up, completely free of cost.
Below, we’re going to walk you through SEO on a budget and allow you to start the process today. Once you’re up and running, if you want to consult an industry expert, there’s no harm in that. But, much of this can be tackled right from the comfort of your couch.
Get ready to charge up your laptop, ace the low-cost SEO game, and draw in a host of new leads, starting today.
1. Start a Blog
Attaching a blog to your website is easy as pie. Coming up with consistent content… now that’s a horse of a different color. Still, first things first. Attaching a blog to your website opens up all kinds of SEO doors. Starting a blog is a free item that you can do to capitalize on affordable SEO.
Authoritative Content
One of the many things Google searches for is authoritative content. So, as Google crawls the world wide web, if it can see that you’re posting quality content to your blog, you may receive a few additional ranking factors.
Dwell Time
When you have a blog chock full of interesting articles, you’re going to naturally increase the dwell time on your website.
This is great for SEO. Again, the almighty Google is going to surmise that you have meaningful content on your site because people are staying a little while longer to read what you have to say.
Keywords
One of the top (free) SEO tips revolves around keywords. In a moment we’re going to dive deeper into keywords, but it’s important to note that maintaining a blog allows you to maximize industry keywords that can get you noticed on Google.
Internal Linking
Imagine you write a killer article on the best kinds of retirement plans for every budget. Whenever someone types “retirement plan” into Google, your article pops up first.
With, say, three links within the article that direct people back to your website, you’re bound to have a lot more traffic than had before you started a blog.
Setting up a blog is a surefire way to demonstrate your industry knowledge and, while you have interested readers, allow them to explore your products and services on your site.
2. Master the Keyword Game
Now, let’s go back to keywords. This is a great low-cost SEO hack you can implement today. Let’s return to our personal finance example.
Say you’re a financial firm that focuses on setting people up with the right IRAs to sail into the sunset at age 65. On your website, you’ll have your “Services” page, your “About Us” page, and more; you’re all set up.
Now, the question you have to ask yourself is, “When people are Googling information about IRAs, what are they typing in?” Is it simply “IRAs?” Is it, “best IRAs?” Or is it something completely different like “retirement planning?”
There are plenty of free keyword research tools out there that will figure this out for you and help you with affordable SEO. Once you type in your proposed keyword, i.e., “IRA,” these keyword research tools will help you hone in on what everybody’s typing into Google.
This will provide you with your primary keyword (the number one hit) as well as a few secondary keywords. Once you have your primary keyword in hand, there are a few key places it needs to be positioned within your website:
- website URL (if possible)
- meta description
- first 150 words of your homepage
- alt tag (on images)
- blog articles
Meta Description
The meta description is the little blurb we see on Google underneath the website URL. This tells people why they should visit your site. As you’re providing a brief description of who you are and what you do, it’s important to include your primary keyword.
Alt Tag
When you post an image, you have your caption and your alt tag. The caption is self-explanatory but the alt tag is simple coding for your image.
Should your image not load (which is a big-time SEO no-no) the alt tag will appear with a description of the photo.
Beyond this, alt tags are used by Google when they crawl websites. If your image has an alt tag, Google will be able to index your page more fully and this will serve you well where the gods of Google are concerned.
Blog Articles
We already touched upon this but, as you write your blog articles, you can position your primary keywords within each article. While your specialty may be IRAs, you don’t have to restrict your blog to articles all on the one topic.
You can get creative and branch out a little. Perhaps you’ll even have some fun and discuss retirement cruises and that sort of thing. As you choose your blog topic, research the appropriate keywords for each topic. With your primary keyword in hand, be sure to include them in the following places in each article:
- article title
- first 150 words of your article
- one heading
- article conclusion (which should include a CTA, or call to action)
3. Create a Link Building Plan
A link building plan is a multi-faceted affair. It pertains to what you do on your own website and what you do when you’re featured on other sites as a subject matter expert. Let’s review what needs to be done here.
External Links
We’ve already touched on one integral component: internal links within your blog posts. On that point, when including internal links to direct readers back to your website, you should also include approximately two external links for 500 – 1,000-word articles and approximately four external links for 1,500 – 2,000-word articles.
Why direct people to an external site other than your own? Well, think of it as a research paper for school.
Students are always required to include a Works Cited page to demonstrate they did their research and referenced authoritative resources when presenting their findings.
Blog articles need to do the same – demonstrate that certain portions of the content came from authoritative sites. So, if you’re in the business of IRAs, you might reference top financial sites like Forbes, Fortune, or The Wall Street Journal when writing your content.
Guest Posts
Next up, it’s time to pitch editors in trade magazines and ask them if they’d like some free content. As you build out your blog with wonderful content, reserve one article to pitch to other sites.
Reach out to the Digital Editors at all your favorite trade magazines. E-mail them, expressing your support of their publication and introducing yourself. Tell them why you’re an industry expert and offer a little blurb of your article.
If someone like Forbes or Fortune takes interest in your article, a few things are going to happen. You’ll have a lovely little byline featured on their website. You’ll also have an article with at least two links to your company site that readers may click on and follow.
4. Improve Your Site’s Readability
One thing we haven’t touched upon is readability. You can have all the right pages within your site and a hundred blog posts but, if your readability is poor, neither Google nor readers are going to like you.
Readability means simplicity. When you write the content on your homepage, introducing your company, keep your sentences short and your paragraphs shorter. Use simple sentences. Don’t elect for long, stringy sentences with lots of clauses.
Also, keep your paragraphs to two or three sentences. That’s right; we said it. Every high school English teacher cringes when they see that online content cannot contain the standard five sentences per paragraph. When readers get the sense that your content is scannable, they’re more likely to stay awhile.
The other way to create a scannability effect is to have headings. Every time you dive off into a different topic area, designate a new title, using an H2 header. This holds true for the web copy on your company site and your blog articles.
There are plenty of tools out there to check the readability of your site. You can run a scan through SEMRuch, Yoast, Readability Analyzer, and more.
5. Get Social Today
Whether we like it or not, social media is inextricably tied to cheap SEO marketing plans. Once you have your standard three accounts up and running (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter), you want to add social sharing buttons to the footers on your website.
This will attract people to your social media profiles. Meanwhile, robust social media profiles will also direct people back to your site. It’s a mutual love affair between SEO and social media, a true ping pong match.
Hashtags
What keywords are to SEO, hashtags are to social media. Use your various accounts as microblogs. Every time you write a new blog article, share that to all your social media accounts. Include an engaging photo, a zippy caption, and link the new article in your bio.
Back to the caption. Either within your caption or as the first comment to your post, it’s important to include all the right hashtags. If your latest article happens to be that retirement cruise, you’re going to want to include all the right #travel, #retirement, #happycouples hashtags in your post.
On social media, people follow hashtags. Whatever their interests are, there’s a hashtag for it. Whether that’s Bible journaling, bullet journaling, retirement planning, or tiki huts!
So, if your post gets lumped into those daily hashtags, hundreds, if not thousands, of people may look at your post, read your caption, and even go so far as to click that link in your bio.
6. Optimize for Mobile
In 2015, Google decided to sniff around and see who’s optimized for mobile. Google likes to cater to the people (thankfully for us) and noticed that more people search the web from their cell phones than their laptops/desktops.
So, if your website displays quickly on both mobile and desktop sites, you’ve just boosted your SEO game another notch. You can test your site through one of Google’s (many) tools.
In their Mobile-Friendly Test, you can enter your URL and Google will give you a score to let you know where you stand. If you find that your site needs quite a number of tweaks, your friends here at Florida SEO can help you adapt your site for mobile-friendliness.
7. Give YouTube a Go
We saved this one for last because it’s a bit of a task, albeit free. Yet, programmatic advertising like YouTube is highly beneficial because people love three things:
- short, readable content
- image-laden content
- short videos
How many people do you notice on trains or in restaurants laughing at memes or watching short TikTok videos? This is where YouTube comes in, combining a little bit of SEO and social media tactics for a better affordable SEO experience.
Your YouTube page itself needs all the right content and keywords embedded within. Likewise, each video also needs all the right hashtags. So, once you’ve recorded a short video on your area of expertise, there are many ways to peddle it across the net and secure some new leads.
If you need help getting your YouTube videos out into the right hands, we can help you with that. One of our true specialties is helping businesses get found on YouTube and drawing in new leads.
Affordable SEO Starts Today
And there you have it! Affordable SEO starts today with a few simple feats and tweaks. Taking a good hard look at your keywords, link-building plan, and social media alone will work wonders.
When you’re ready to go hard at your SEO game, we hope you’ll contact us. We love taking low-traffic websites and turning them into SEO glory.
No matter your industry, we can help you get noticed on Google and, thus, reel in a slew of new leads. Until then, we hope these SEO tips and tricks will serve you well!
