SEO on a Shoestring for Small Businesses

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is great if you work in a web team and have hands on deck to keep up with all the tasks – but what if you are a small business and one-man band without the resources of a larger company?

Unless you have a magic formula for cloning yourself or stretching the day in to more hours, you need to prioritise your SEO and concentrate on the key tasks.

The focus is on SEO with the best return – and here are some ways of maximising that budget:

• Set measurable goals that make your working day more effective – then plan the route along the way. SEO is like a journey – you need to look at where you are going then plan the stops on the way rather than just heading off in a random direction and hope you reach your destination

 

• Understand your customers – you should know everything about them except their name so you can laser target your marketing on the people who want to do business with you. This often means setting up buyer personas – details like whether customers are male or female, their age, their likes and dislikes, where they live, their jobs, what they want to buy and why.

 

• Now you know your marketing objectives and who your customers are likely to be, tailor your online marketing to take in social media hang-outs where your target audience goes. Think sniper not scattergun. Every shot you take costs time and money and your budget is limited, so make every one count.

 

• Schedule your activity. Have a weekly timetable so you know your content generation deadlines and match publication and posting to the times when your target audience is online. Look at software that might ease your time constraints, like Hootsuite has free and paid versions that can manage Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many more social media profiles in a central dashboard.

 

• Repurpose content to save time. A blog post can be rewritten as an FAQ or a how to. Then articles on a theme can be grouped in to guides. It’s the same content reworked. Think about evergreen posts that can sit on your web site and collect traffic for months or years.

 

• Lead nurturing is cheap and effective – at the simplest, lead nurturing is setting up an autoresponder to send out email messages when a web site visit carries out an action, like clicking a button or signing up for a newsletter or course.

 

Running marketing campaign on a shoestring budget is tough – but with some planning, you can still pick up some good SEO results.

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