The goal of a cost effective SEO campaign is usually to get the highest returns possible from money and time invested. This requires that you stick to the best practices that yield the best results and that expose you to the lowest risks.

We at Digital+ appreciate the importance of the principle of integrity in business. We therefore recommend only those methods that yield the best results and that do not go against the quality guidelines of the search engines.

Begin by Tweaking Your Current Site

Executing a successful cost effective SEO campaign begins with understanding that your existing site can do much better if it is properly optimized.

The problem with some of the big SEO companies is that their SEO packages include building a brand new website for a client even if they already have a live website. This hugely drives up the cost of the SEO package and goes against the spirit of cost effective SEO services.

There are more drawbacks to this strategy than there are benefits.

First, you’ll have a brand new website that is effectively a competitor of your old website. This confuses both your customers and the search engines. Second, some of these SEO companies do not reveal to you that the terms of the contract allow them to retain the new site when you choose to discontinue the SEO plan. You’ll be back to square one when you hire a new SEO company. That is bad business.

Do not go this route. Ensure you own any sites built for you by any SEO company you hire.

If you already have a reasonably good website, you can optimize it by:

Optimizing it for relevant search terms: ensure that your website’s content is optimized to rank for particular keywords and search terms that your customers are actually using to look for a business like yours on Google. A quick keyword research with a tool like Google Keyword Planner will reveal such keywords.

Getting the technical architecture right: Google won’t rank your site if it can’t access your content. This might be a little intimidating but all you need to pay attention to is ensuring that the search engine robots can easily index your content. You can start by submitting a sitemap to the major search engines.

Target the Low Hanging Fruits

The goal of cost effective SEO is to get maximum returns from time and money invested in the shortest time possible.

The easiest way to start seeing results in your business from SEO is to target the low volume easy to win keywords.

If you have a small budget and are really looking to execute a cost effective SEO campaign, there’s no need spending time and money trying to compete with the Fortune 500 companies for the high volume keywords with massive competition. The chances of you beating them are very slim. You’ll waste both time and money.

A good cost effective SEO campaign is best done by targeting the low volume low competition buyer keywords that can be ranked for after putting in reasonable work. The conversation rates from such keywords can actually be higher than the high volume keywords.

Less Content, More Promotion

You probably understand that your website should have good content if your SEO campaign is to succeed. What most people don’t understand is that content promotion is more important than content creation.

You need to see results from your business as soon as possible. This can only be achieved if you are promoting your work.

Some online content creators do not even promote their work. This does not make any sense.

Picture this: you are a detergent manufacturer. You spend months coming up with the perfect detergent. You then go ahead and manufacture lots of the product and pile them up in your warehouse. You run no marketing campaign for the detergent. Naturally, nobody places an order. The reason for this is simple – nobody knows that your detergent even exists. You get frustrated and rationalize that maybe people will be interested if you produced a better product. You go ahead and manufacture another detergent… do no marketing for it… nobody buys… you get frustrated… manufacture another detergent… nobody buys…

This is just stupid.

Sadly, some business owners treat their online content like this clueless detergent manufacturer treats his detergent. If you don’t get the word out about your content then no one is going to share it or link to it.

The bottom line: for a cost effective SEO campaign, spend just as much or more time promoting your content as you do creating it.

Don’t Buy Links. Create Link Worthy Content

Awesome link worthy content is a critical piece of the cost effective SEO campaign puzzle.

Buying links is not only expensive from the cost per link perspective, it can get you penalized by Google and the resultant drop in traffic can completely cripple your business.

Instead of creating low quality content that nobody wants to link to and so resorting to buying links, create something that actually deserves to appear on Google’s top ten results. This makes link building a lot more easy.

Pursue Long Lasting Results

Executing a cost effective SEO campaign requires that you stop pursuing short-term trends and gains and go for results that last.

Good SEO should be able to stand the test of time. This ensures that the rewards from the rankings achieved continue to flow to your business for years.

It might take more time and effort, but the peace of mind it affords you and the business that will flow to you as a result is well worth the effort.

Don’t fall for get-rich-quick-SEO-services. You’ll lose money as your rankings will tank as soon as the search engines release the next update expunging spam from their engines.

Concluding Remarks

Currently good SEO boils down to having great keyword optimized content and building great links to them from trustworthy sites. Even with a cost effective SEO campaign, the basics shouldn’t be forgotten.
You’ll be fine as long as you follow the advice given above.

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