SEO-SEO-SEO!

As marketers and business owners, we’ve all been hearing the drums of SEO—indeed, they are loud. And why not? After all, 49% of marketers claim that SEO has the best ROI out of any other marketing technique.

“But Lakshaya! SEO is expensive to start with, right? I mean guest posting, link-building, and whatnot—it all costs money.”

Yes, it may cost money. However, that doesn’t diminish the existence of affordable SEO strategies.

And what is that? Well, let’s find out!

Understanding SEO 

A person makes a Google search looking for the best dog supplies in California and gets bombarded with the search results. However, you are unable to find your dog supplies business on the first page.

This is what happens when we overlook SEO.

SEO, abbreviated for Search Engine Optimization, refers to the process of optimizing your website and its content in a way that search engines prioritize it while laying out the SERPs (search engine result pages).

The ultimate goal of SEO is to make your website rank higher in the SERPs and eventually reach Google’s #1 position.

And how does that happen?

To put it simply, Google considers over 200 factors to decide whether a website should rank higher in the SERPs.

For starting out, here’s what an SEO flowchart looks like:

Effective Tools for Affordable SE

A good marketing strategy requires advanced tools and the right marketing fundamentals.

Here are some useful SEO tools that are available on a budget.

Uber Suggest

Uber Suggest is a popular tool by Neil Patel that can help you perform basic SEO, website audit, and backlink analysis.

If you are an SEO beginner or a small business owner looking for affordable SEO solutions, this tool could be your best bet.

The use case here is very simple and straightforward:

• Put your competitors’ website(s) in the tool to check their high-ranking pages and low-hanging keywords.
• Ubersuggest also allows users to generate keyword and topic ideas from their seed keywords.
• Backlink analysis also becomes easy and affordable with Ubersuggest. 

Uber Suggest provides the following key metrics on keyword analysis:

• Search Volume
• SEO difficulty score
• Competitor analysis
• Paid difficulty
• Domain Authority
• Backlinks

And here’s the best part, Ubersuggest comes at super affordable rates. Here’s what their pricing plans look like.

Google Analytics 

Google Analytics is a free tool that provides valuable insights into your website’s performance. It lets you track important metrics such as website traffic, user behavior, and conversions. With Google Analytics, you can identify which pages are performing well and which need improvement.

Google Analytics provides key metrics on the following points:

• Landing Page Bounce Rate 
• New Visitors
• Top Categories by Page Views 
• Top Performing Keywords 
• Top cities driving traffic 
• Top Traffic source 

Follow these steps to set up your Google Analytics account and connect it to your website.

1. Sign up for Google Analytics  

Visit the Google Analytics website and create/sign in using an existing Google account and click on Get Started today.

2. Click on the Start Measuring option

3. Account setup—Give a name to your account

Read and decide the data you want to share and click on the Next Button. 

1. Set Up a Property.
2. Enter a property name for your website.
3. Enter your time zone.
4. Enter the currency you use.
5. Add your business information.
6. Select the right industry category.
7. Select your business size from small to very large.
8. Select the boxes you want to use with Google Analytics.
9. Click on the ‘Create’ button to proceed.
10. Read and accept the terms of service.

4. Customize your Email communication

Select the boxes according to your preference. Click on the ‘Save’ button to move ahead.

5. Select the platform where you want to collect the data 

6. Set up your data stream

• Enter your website URL. 
• Put in your preferred stream name. 
• Decide on whether you want to enable enhanced measurement or not. 
• Continue further by clicking on the ‘create stream’ button.

7. Webstream details

Here you will receive a measurement ID, you need to connect it to your website. Select the Global site tag (gtag.js) or Tag manager as per your utility. 

8. Using Global site tag (gtag.js)

With the Global site tag, you will see a snippet of the code. The code snippet permits Google to measure data on your website. Your measurement ID is also visible in the code snippet. 

To integrate Google Analytics with your website, this code needs to be pasted in the header section of your website.

This will allow Google Analytics to track your website data including web traffic, conversions, and other events.

Also, depending on the platform your website is functioning on, you can integrate this code into your website’s header.

For example, if your website’s CMS is WordPress, you can use plugins such as GA Google Analytics.

SEMRush

SEMRush is a stalwart in the SEO arena. It is a comprehensive SEO tool offering a range of useful features. From robust keyword research capabilities to in-depth competitor analysis, tools for generating keyword ideas, and whatnot—SEMRush has it all.

Some important key metrics that you can track using SEMRush:

• Position Tracking
• Site Audit
• SEO Visibility 
• Optimizing conversion rate
• Engagement metrics
• Site Health metrics

SEMRush’s Pricing Structure:

Ahrefs 

Ahrefs is one the most popular SEO tools for a good reason. It has everything you need to rank higher and get more traffic. It has been primarily considered as a backlink authority checker. The platform has all the necessary tools that users/marketers need to monitor and improve the organic reach of their website. 

Referring to a report by Aira, The State of Link Building report as of 2022. About 67% of SEO professionals use Ahrefs domain rating as their SEO metric of choice.

Some important key metrics offered by Ahrefs:

• Site Explorer tool
• Keyword Explorer tool
• SEO Backlinks
• Indexing
• Website Health score
• Domain rating
• Improving Core Web Vitals

Pricing Structure of Ahrefs: 

Does Affordable SEO mean doing it yourself?

Regarding SEO, you do not always need to rely on outsourcing your marketing efforts. You can find many affordable SEO strategies and make use of them.

Below is a simple explanation and application of some Affordable SEO tools.

How to use Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for SEO marketing, especially for beginners stepping into SEO marketing. 

Google Analytics allows users to view how visitors interact with their website. Data collection, analytics, tracking, visualization, and integration with other applications like Google Ad sense, email, and website are made possible with features offered by Google Analytics. 

Follow these steps to get started with Google Analytics.

Step 1: Set up an account and define your goals 

You need to set up Google Analytics and link it to your website. Further, define your goals. Goals are the desired actions you want the visitor to take on your website. The actions can include signup, booking an appointment, downloading, etc. 

Goals/Actions can be set up in the admin section of Google Analytics; you can also track visitors’ conversion rates. 

Step 2: Analyze all your traffic sources 

Traffic sources are the channels that bring visitors to your website; these can be organic, like social media, email, direct referrals, or inorganic, such as paid ads (display/paid ads) for online and offline. 

You can find the traffic sources in the Acquisition section of Google Analytics. Here, you can analyze the performance of each channel concerning the session duration, bounce rates, pages per session, and goal completion. Different channels can be compared to asses which have a better conversion rate. 

Step 3: Identify your Target Keywords 

Keywords are the words and phrases your audience uses to search over Google. You can find the business-specific keywords in the search console section of Google Analytics. With this section in place, you can see the queries that drive traffic to your website. 

Step 4: Optimize your content 

Content is the information you provide on your website; it can be text, infographics, videos, or podcasts 

Content optimization can be done using the right keywords in your titles, headings, meta descriptions, and body text. You can find the content data in the behavior section of Google Analytics. 

Step 5: Segment your Audience

It is the process where user divides their audience into groups based on the audience’s characteristics, behaviors, or preferences. 

You can use the Audience section of Google Analytics for segmentation. You can also create custom segments based on their criteria. 

Step 6: Test and Improve 

Testing and improving include experimenting and improving your website’s technical and non-technical parameters and measuring their impact on SEO results. You can use the experiments feature of Google Analytics for all such requirements. 

What is “Google Webmaster Tools?”

Google webmaster tool is commonly known as Google Search Console. It is a free tool that allows users to check their website’s performance, identify crawling issues, and communicate changes and corrections to Google. Its main function is to improve search results, improving search engine ranking. This tool can also provide updates on your sitemaps’ status and send alerts in case of any indexing issues. 

Best Practices to Follow While Using Google Search Console

1. Use the Right Property Type When Adding a Website

You can add a website to the Google Search Console in two ways: as a URL-prefix property or as a Domain property.

It is advisable to add your website as the domain property; it will cover all URLs on that particular domain and subdomains. Using this way, you can monitor your entire website as one property. 

2. Monitor the Coverage Report Regularly

The coverage report is highly useful as it points out the crawl errors on your website. These errors could directly affect your search visibility results, so it is important to eliminate them. 

3. Check for Manual Actions Applied to Your Site

While using the Google Search Console, you need to click on the site you want to investigate, see left on the page, select Search Traffic, and click on Manual Actions. 

If you don’t have any actions taken on your site, you’ll see the “No manual webspam actions found.”

What is “Bing Webmaster Tools?”

The Bing webmaster tool is a free tool by Microsoft; it allows users or marketers to add their sites to Bing crawlers and show up in the search engine (Bing). 

Is Bing Webmaster Tools Setup Worth It?

The short answer is Yes; first of all, it is free, provides data and insights, and almost matches all functions of Google Search Console. It also has some helpful SEO tools that are not available with Google Search Console but with only premium SEO tools like SEM Rush, Ahrefs, etc. 

Bing also holds 9.41% of the market share among different search engines. 

Bing webmaster tool also offers free conversion optimization tools such as heatmaps and screen recorder of Microsoft Clarity, which competes with tools like Hotjar. 

Steps to Get Started with Bing Webmaster Tools

Step 1: Open a Bing Webmaster Tools Account

Open the Bing Webmaster tool and sign in, or sign up and open a free Bing Webmaster Tools account. You can also sign up using an existing Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account. 

Step 2: Add & Verify Your Website

Once you have set up your Bing Webmaster Tools account, you can Add Sites to your account. Further, you need to verify ownership of the website. 

Click on the Add and Verify Site section on the left side of the page. Follow the instructions on how to add and verify your website.

Step 3: Create and Upload Your Sitemaps

Adding Sitemaps helps to tell Bing about URLs on your site. Bing supports formats like XML Sitemaps and XML Sitemap index files, Atom 0.3 and 1.0.

Step 4: Create a Search Optimization Plan

On the left side, you can check SEO under webmaster tools and features. Using the given tools here, you can prepare an SEO plan. 

A Simple Strategy for Easy-to-Implement SEO

Step 1: Sign Up

Sign up for a free trial or Purchase tool. Many advanced tools like SemRush, AHREFs, Hotjar, etc. exist, but you can go for easy-to-implement and affordable SEO tools like Uber Suggest and Google Analytics. 

Step 2: Keyword Research

Identify the terms your audience is searching for.

Step 3: On-page Optimization

This includes optimizing titles, descriptions, and headings with targeted keywords. 

Step 4: Content Creation

Here, the user or marketer has to develop valuable, engaging content around targeted keywords to improve organic traffic and collect data points. 

Step 5: Internal Linking

Interlinking your website content passes useful link juice from one page to another. Also, the right kind of interlinking can help boost traffic to your other high-value pages.

For example, we recently published an SEO case study discussing how our SEO tactics helped boost our client’s web traffic by 300$ in three months. This is an internal link.

Step 6: Backlink building 

In this method, users or marketers must acquire links from authoritative websites to increase their site’s credibility and visibility. 

Step 7: Local SEO 

It is a technique with which users can implement local keyword targeting and Google My Business optimization for businesses targeting specific geographic areas. 

Step 8: Technical SEO 

It improves website speed, cross-platform utility (search engine), mobile responsiveness, and crawlability to improve search engine ranking. 

Step 9: Updating Content

This deals with adding more valuable, engaging content to maintain SEO and search visibility. 

Step 10: Performance Monitoring

This step should be carried out on a time-to-time basis. It involves tracking key metrics using tools like Google Analytics to measure your website’s SEO success.

Final Thoughts

SEO is the most useful method of organically improving marketing outcomes and generating quality leads for your business. SEO is increasingly becoming necessary for businesses, but finding affordable SEO services can be challenging. 

The best advice we can give is to pen down the objectives you want to achieve through SEO and start using a free tool like Google Analytics. You can choose Ubersuggest for $12 a month; it has a more simplified user interface. 

Research, implement, and experiment, but trust only the most reputable SEO services for your business.