What Makes SEO So Expensive and How to Reduce Those Costs

If there is one thing that is critical to the success of a website, it is its utilization of SEO. SEO or search engine optimization is used to help search engines provide people with the best possible search results. 

The better your SEO, the more likely you are going to show up on the first page. In fact, it is so important that companies such as Coca-Cola and Disney spend millions of dollars just to ensure they remain at the very top. 

Unfortunately, this can make SEO very expensive for the little guys. The following includes further information on why SEO is so expensive and what you can do to reduce those costs.

Why SEO is Expensive

The reason why SEO is so expensive really boils down to three reasons. These include the time it takes for you to begin to rank within search engines (usually a month), the cost of running and maintaining a campaign, and finally, experts who understand what keywords are going to work for your specific business and which are going to waste your money. 

Although there are additional costs such as bidding for placement, these are the most common reasons why you may see a very expensive upfront cost.

Reducing the Cost of SEO

Understandably, most companies, especially if they are new, are likely running on a shoestring budget. Their financial priorities may be focused on paying employees and vendors, and SEO often takes a backseat. 

However, you can reduce a lot of the costs of SEO building by hiring an SEO partner company to take over that aspect of your business and allow you to focus on the rest. They can integrate best SEO practices into your existing marketing initiatives and work as a complement to them, as well as building separate link-building campaigns for your business.

Audit Your Website

One of the most common mistakes business owners make is not auditing their website before launching a marketing campaign. Unfortunately, this can cause higher bounce rates, leading you to have to spend further to attract more visitors to your website. 

However, by taking the time to audit your website and see where issues are present, you are potentially eliminating the need to spend more on your SEO. 

A lot of websites have SEO tools built right in that can help you ensure you have the right metadata to help make sure Google is reading your site correctly and directing the right people there.

Write Content for Your Website

As stated above, keywords are critical to helping search engines connect people with the right type of search results. The more keywords you can add to your site that match your business, the better your ranking will be and the less you have to spend on running ads. 

You can accomplish this by starting a blog within your website. Keywords need to be supported by a lot of content, and having a blog creates a natural way for you to have lots of content about your target keywords without info-dumping on every sales page you have.

Reducing the cost of SEO is something even fortune 500 companies are struggling to do. However, that does not mean it's impossible. In fact, because you are a smaller business, actions such as adding content and auditing your website can go a long way in reducing that cost.

On a Tight Budget, Are You? Here's How to Rock Your Content Marketing

How do you succeed in content marketing while squeezed for cash? Use the following tips to rock your content strategy without letting your budget slow you down.

Focus on Profitable Content Types

Ideally, you might want to publish content in a variety of formats to appeal to the largest audience possible. However, your tight budget means that you have to be more selective in your activities.

Find out what types of content resonate the most with your website visitors and focus on those to maximize your ROI. To do this, use a combination of analytics and trial and error data. Also, monitor your competitors to see what content formats they use.

As part of the process, calculate the time and money you must spend to create each type of content. When you find a format that consistently gets results that justifies its cost, stick with it. Such a focus will help you avoid wasting your resources while maximizing profitability.

Prioritize Quality Over Quantity

Do you have to publish a certain amount of content during a period of time? Such a practice may keep your website fresh, but it can lead to low-quality, “thin” content that fails to impress your visitors.

As a general rule, quality matters more than quantity. Still, you need to avoid over optimizing your content to control costs. After you reach a minimum quality level, additional efforts will have diminishing returns. 




Your limited budget means that you can’t afford to insist on total perfection. Using the 80/20 standard as a rule of thumb, the majority of your quality will come from a minimal amount of work.

Improve Your Efficiency

You may sometimes feel as though your limited resources will prohibit you from achieving the growth your business deserves. Rather than becoming discouraged, look for ways to do more with what you have.

For instance, you can save a lot of time by grouping similar tasks from multiple projects in batches that you complete in a single sitting. Rather than researching a topic for just one blog post, prepare a couple dozen topics before exiting your research mode.

Other ways to improve efficiency include outsourcing work to freelancers, repurposing outdated content, and optimizing your processes. Also, cloud-based software for time and project management can also help you work smarter rather than harder.

Take a Holistic Approach

Rather than focusing only on online marketing channels, create a wholesome marketing strategy that includes both online and offline tactics. By extending your reach via traditional methods, you can reduce your overall expenditures while increasing your ROI.

Try ordering business cards and passing them out at community events. Also, remember that printed media such as billboards, magazines and newspapers can help you achieve your goals. Other tactics, such as giving free public lectures at libraries and schools cost you nothing while establishing yourself as an industry and community leader.

By incorporating multiple channels in your strategy, you can create a synergy that extends the usefulness of your limited funds. For example, your printed business cards, books and flyers should include your URL and can boost your website traffic.

Utilize Free Content

Content creation takes time and, therefore, it costs money. However, you can find ways to get content for free that can dramatically extend the usefulness of your budget. Start by providing guest-blogging opportunities.

Rather than paying cash for content, you compensate your guest bloggers by giving them access to your audience. On the other hand, they can increase the authority of your brand while exposing it to some of their loyal followers.

To increase your access to free content, publish a page on your website that announces guest-blogging opportunities. Be sure to specify available topics and outline your quality requirements.

Always Deliver Value

You might feel pressured to reduce your quality standards in order to accommodate your small budget. Such an approach may reduce your production costs, but hurt you in other ways. To begin with, poor-quality content may not meet the needs of your shoppers and customers. Additionally, poor content can also damage your page rank in search engine results. 




Instead, if you emphasize quality over quantity, you can create content that meets the real-world needs of your audience. As time passes, people will begin to trust your site and brand to get the information they need.

In the end, your readers will begin to regard your brand as the natural choice when they get ready to buy. So, emphasize quality and see your content marketing budget accomplish more than you ever thought possible.

Build Content Libraries

Rather than discarding your research after using it, archive it on a shared folder on your server. As you build your content library, you will have tons of videos, articles, illustrations, templates and snippets at your fingertips.

After a while, you will have a huge repository of all the factual and creative content that covers all the topics you cover. Rather than designing and creating all your content from scratch, use items from your content library as building blocks.

In other words, you retain the value of your work by extending its usefulness well into the future. Meanwhile, you gain additional cost savings by speeding your content creation processes.

In summary, by taking an intentional approach, you can rock your content marketing operation. While emphasizing creativity, quality and efficiency, you can publish the content you need to grow your business without going broke.

Jasmine Williams covers the good and the bad of today's business and marketing. When she’s not being all serious and busy, she’s usually hunched over a book or dancing in the kitchen, trying hard to maintain rhythm, and delivering some fine cooking (her family says so). Tweet her @JazzyWilliams88

How To Do Quality Competitor Analysis for SEO

It is a fact that SEO is one of the pillars of success for your business. A crucial step for starting to develop an SEO strategy is competitor analysis. 

Competitor analysis provides you with the data that you need in order to know what industry trends are currently booming and how you can improve your keyword rankings. 

What you learn from it can help you realize the tasks that you need to focus on, and is the main factor for the development of your campaigns. 

You will get to learn your competitor’s weaknesses and strengths and be able to find a way to outperform them.

Who are your competitors?

For starters, you are going to have to find out who are the top four competitors that you are going to use for your analysis. 

It might be a good idea to use a mix of direct business and online search competitors. The reason for this is that you’ve got competition that is local, as well as the one that is investing in online search ads. 

So, while you may be worrying about a business nearby, your actual competition may be in another town or state.

A good tool for searching competitors is SEMrush. Input your own domain name, go to “organic competitors” and look at the full report. 

Then focus on metrics such as common keywords and total traffic in order to determine who your biggest competitors are.

How technically optimized are they?

When it comes to technical optimization, you will be checking for a number of things. For example, you will check whether their title tags are technically optimized (one title tag per page, correct placement within head tags, few to no extraneous tags in the title). 

You will also check whether their internal linking allows indexation of content, and if there is an error-free schema markup present. The quality of the schema is also important (whether there is customized markup such as BlogPosting, for example). 

You should also check whether there is a “home” for new content (is there a content hub, and is it easily noticeable). 

While you can’t run a complete technical audit for your every competitor, you need to keep in mind your own website’s technical SEO performance and the issues that you need to focus on.

How good is their content?

When it comes to content, you will be checking title tags again, but from an editorial point of view. 

Check whether they accurately represent the content on the page, if there are any duplicates, and are the titles shorter than 80 characters. There also has to be a unique H1 for every page, and represent its content. 

Next thing that you should check out is whether internal linking supports organic content. This is based on the quality of the links. 

Basically, it means that they should lead to informative pages, such as tutorials or research, be a natural continuation of the user’s journey through the website, and vary the resources that they link to.

The quality of content, while subjective, is important for comparing brands. You need to check in how many words are informative pages dealing with complex topics. 

You should also evaluate whether you really want to read the content, does it look well-written, and whether it contains valuable information. Originality is also important, so, from the experience of a web design agency, competitor analysis is the best way to find the best trends to follow. 

The quality of images and video is also important. They have to be unique, be in proper resolution, and not be repeated on multiple pages.

In summation

By analyzing these factors, you will be able to locate opportunities where you can excel with your own website. Through competitor analysis, you will be able to find the trends that exist among the competition. This way you will be able to make the best out of them in order to stand out amongst the competition.

How SEO Can Help Your Business Grow

In a world of modern marketing, it’s almost impossible to skip SEO. Almost everywhere you look there is a success SEO story behind a big company. But what is SEO? How to approach Search Engine Optimization and what does that mean for your business.

Generating leads and retention, gaining higher visibility and reach and even helping with strategic promotion, SEO can be quite useful when used properly. It can pay off significantly to learn about it so here are some basics and benefits of SEO.

What’s SEO?

The main goal of Search Engine Optimization is to make your website more visible in the “organic” search results on search engines like Google or Yahoo. It’s generally well known that websites that appear higher on the search list get higher traffic rates.

Implementing good SEO solutions can help you get a higher position, but it also depends on the type of business you’re running. 

If you’re in the mobile market or having travel services, you will need quite a budget to finance the top placement, but working with defined geographic areas can help you reach that first page if you are patient and ready to learn.

Benefits of SEO

There are various ways of implementing a successful SEO to your business. You can learn all you can about it, and approach it from your personal stand point, or you can hire a professional help such as a highly professional SEO company from Australia. 

With professionals involved, you can have some guarantees, and it can mean quite a lot for your page. From leads and traffic generation to the full return of the investment – SEO has quite a lot of benefits, so let’s go through some of them.

• Increased Traffic – One of the fastest ways of generating niche market traffic to your site is through SEO article marketing. With articles that are attention-grabbing, informative yet light to read, you aim at your specific target market. This way you generate streams of traffic with good content, and with well-written articles, you gain great credibility.
• Get Brand Recognition – Brand recognition is the degree to which your customers are able to recognize your products or services. Local SEO helps in improving the visibility of your brand before the potential customers in your local area. Frequent exposure of your brand to your customers leads to enhanced brand recognition, which may eventually lead the customer to a purchase.
• Generating Leads – According to Search Engine Watch, around 60% of the clicks in Google search results are taken by the results in the top three rankings. By investing in a Local SEO campaign, a business will be promoted higher in the local search results. This causes larger number of people to click on the website. With an increase in traffic coming to the website, the number or prospective customers also increases, which may lead to increased sales.
• Research Cycle – These days everyone checks the internet for the needed information, before anything else. Well-developed SEO strategy can help you become an integral part of any product or service research. Recent studies have shown that more than 60% of consumers have more confidence in companies that have useful content on their pages, and using this information can help you boost your online business quite fast.
• Increases Earning Potential – Local SEO offers a business tremendous potential to increase earnings. The revenue you generate by using Local SEO will be many times higher than the investment with which you start. The improved visibility that a Local SEO provides will help a business in maximizing sales, leading to revenue generation.

Conclusion

With internet expanding extremely fast and new companies emerging daily, it can be quite challenging to stay on top of your competition, or even stand a chance in the market. That’s why there are SEO marketing experts that can help you learn how to approach your target audience.

In order to stand out and generate the proper traffic, you need to start thinking about quality content and all the best ways there are to optimize it. 

In the end of the day, take yourself as an example – if you wouldn’t look at the 5th page of Google results for something you’re looking for, how can you expect someone to look for your website so deep. SEO can help you quite a lot if you follow these basic principles.