Can cheap SEO for a website get results?

Why is spending the right amount of money on SEO important?

SEO at its most basic level is authoritative content that is optimised for a specific audience in a way that search engines can crawl effectively and give you ranking.

It is the cheapest most effective marketing strategy particularly for businesses that offer a solution where people search for.

Here are three ways you can invest in SEO affordably.

• Doing it house - Upskilling a member of your team with knowledge of SEO 
• Freelancer - Outsource to a freelancer to run part or all of your SEO 
• SEO Agency - Getting an online marketing specialist to do the SEO for you.

In this article, we share strategies to make sure ‘Affordable SEO’ can get results.

1. Why is SEO still the cheapest form of online marketing
2. What is the best way to do SEO for your business
   - Doing it house
   - Freelancer
   - SEO Agency

Why is SEO still the cheapest form of online marketing?

In 2012 Google stated there were over 100 billion searches per month, combine that with data from Search Engine Journal, SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7% close rate. Visit the practical seo guide for more details.

So getting your business found on Google in the organic listings should be part of your online marketing activity.

What is the best way to do SEO for your business?

Define your content strategy

Whatever way you choose to go with executing your SEO, there are financial benefits at each point. But it must start with a strategy.

If your business does not have experience in this area we would recommend you either research what your competitors are doing or get an SEO strategic consultant to work with you on a plan.

Doing it in house

Research what your competitors are doing. Look at the content that is being created, the velocity at which the content is being created.

Finally the content type - is it advisory blog content that is establishing a market position of authority?

Once you have looked at the content that is being created on their blogs, where is it pointing internally and externally. 

TIP This is a very important part of on-page SEO

For example, if you are selling legal advice and your blog articles are full of interesting cases, they should point specifically to the service that you offer in that sector.

Recap a blog article if written correctly should be helpful and unbiased in its content. If you happen to link to your own solution that is fine but remember to research and present the facts only.

Freelancer

Look for a freelancer that has experience at a level that can direct or advise on a strategic plan. Because like in all projects if you fail to plan properly, the plan will fail.

SEO Agency

Questions to ask an SEO agency

How do they build backlinks?

Are they actively searching for places to build the links?

Content creation and on-page SEO deployment

Remember the mantra from Bill Gates “Content is King”? Google and other search engines value content above everything else.

Doing it in house

Your business marketing strategy is only as good as the content you create.

In many cases, the direction or the draft of the content should come from the business owners or managers. The blogs do need a particular writing technique that will be liked and ranked by search engines. 

You should read our articles on article creation, researching content and the Flesch scoring system.

Freelancer

A recommended route we often take is outsourcing the heavy lifting with SEO and getting your blogs written by a freelancer or professional copywriter. 

SEO Agency

If you can afford an SEO agency to run your whole campaign then this will enable the SEO team to write the best content to fit the long term plan for your SEO

Backlinking and guest blogging

All search engines crawl the internet with special types of bots that are programmed to scrape content and evaluate it across multiple touchpoints.

The touchpoints scrape URLs that are embedded in content and rank the number of links from one website to another

The more backlinks you have the better? Not all the time, a link from a high ranking domain will count way higher than many links from a spammy website.

Doing it in house

First, you will need a toolbox of software where you can track and document backlinks to your website. 

Some good resources on this subject:

• https://ahrefs.com
• https://www.semrush.com
• https://majestic.com
• https://backlinko.com
• https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk

Using PR can work wonders for your marketing at any point of your marketing cycle.

TIP Content that is published in newspapers, is a great way of getting links from high ranking domains to your website

Freelancer

Ask your freelancer what tools they use to build backlinks, can they get articles published into high ranking domains?

SEO Agency

Ask your SEO agency what tools they use, how they build backlinks. If you are in a very competitive market you may require great PR to boost your SEO efforts. So selecting the SEO agency will come down to the right fit for your business.

Summary

The ‘Cheapest SEO’ will be to do it yourself, but will it get the best results for your business?

We do our own in house SEO and we have to put aside 10 hours a week to run our content campaigns, so that should give you an idea of the time it takes a marketing company to execute on a relatively simple message.

With SEO there is not a one size fits all project, so fully understanding your business goals is an important part of pricing your SEO. 

And you must factor in the cost of the time you spend on doing the work in the first place. SEO requires creative abilities.

Do you need help with your SEO? Please visit our SEO agency in London Service page.