Whether you have a small or large SEO budget, you want to spend your money wisely on the things that move the needle. Well, here is where to put your SEO money:
3 Areas to Spend Your SEO Budget
Quality content
If you have been following the development of the web and Google search in particular, you know that Google favors quality content that is valuable to the intended reader.
If you don’t have the time to write quality content, you should invest in a quality and knowledgeable writer to do it for you.
Yes, content is essential when investing in SEO. But avoid spending money on generic, regurgitated material created only for Google bots to consume. The time when such content ranked is gone.
Google now prefers and rewards helpful content. They want to encourage the creation of useful information for people looking for solutions, inspiration, and answers.
Therefore, you should strive to create top-quality content.
Hire experts in the industry to help you create the content. For example, hire a real, practicing lawyer to help make the content if you are in the legal industry. If they don’t write the content, ask them to review it and ensure the facts are correct.
You also should invest resources in original studies. This way, you have data and information that no other person in the industry has.
When you create high-quality content, you help your target readers and attract links that push your website even higher.
Backlinks
Although Google has constantly rolled out link spam updates meant to penalize websites building links, it doesn’t mean that links are worthless in SEO. Backlinks are still a ranking factor, but you must get the links correctly to get the benefits.
According to Google, search engines can now identify and eliminate from the SERPs websites with artificial backlink profiles in favor of ranking the most relevant and useful results for all queries.
This means that for you to stand a chance, you need to get the links the right way.
One of the most effective ways is to create high-quality content.
As mentioned above, when you create valuable content that people can’t find elsewhere or easily replicate, they link to you. This way, you get links naturally without putting much effort.
Another excellent strategy is to reach out to other bloggers in your industry and request to contribute to their websites.
Of course, this is a tedious endeavor. If you don’t have the time to contact the bloggers, follow up, and write the content, you should highly consider hiring a professional SEO services provider to help you with it.
The professional will find sites relevant to your business, contact the bloggers, write the content, keep a record of all the published articles, and ensure that all the links pointing to your website stay there.
Easy-to-use website
The other place to spend your SEO budget is on a good website. Besides quality content and backlinks, Google puts a lot of weight on how people interact with your website when they get there.
The longer the people stay on your site, the more your site appeals to the search engines, hence the higher your rank.
So, to get people to stay on your site, you must ensure the site is properly designed. If you have the skills, you can design the site yourself, but if you don’t, hire a professional web designer to help you out.
Your SEO company can also help redesign the site and ensure your readers have an excellent user experience.
Part of the experience is ensuring that your site is easily findable by search engines and people. For search engines, have a site map in place. For people to easily find their way around, link all the vital pages on top—do not hide them in the website footer.
How long people stay on your site determines how long it takes to load.
Studies show that people will click away if your site takes more than 3 seconds to load, so always ensure your site has a fast load time.
Thankfully, there are plenty of things you can do to achieve this. For example, you can reduce third-party scripts and resize your images, among many other tricks.
How does the site feel and look? It would be best if, first, you thought about this. As much as you want to make money with ads, you shouldn’t place them all over. But, of significant importance, you shouldn’t put them above the fold, as they are bound to get in the way of the user and make your site look too cluttered.
Let your content breathe so that it’s easy for people to read. If the text is too small, format it so it’s readable on a phone and a computer. You should remove as many elements as possible and only include the necessary ones.
If you visit many websites, you won’t be able to tell what they do or offer. Google is currently paying attention to how authoritative the website owner is, and they are rewarding the most authoritative content.
To make it easy for search engines and people to trust your website, be clear about what you do and offer. It would be best if you also made it easy to find this information.
As you design your site, pay attention to those with poor eyesight and ensure they can still read your content. Also, consider multitasking parents, such as going through a website while holding a baby. You must ensure that they can easily scroll through your site.
A good rule of thumb is to ensure that your website complies with the ARIA and WCAG standards, which require your website to be easily accessible and simple to crawl.
Conclusion
While there is too much noise in the SEO world, it doesn’t mean you should throw your money into everything. To see results, you must allocate your SEO budget to three departments: quality content, quality backlinks, and an easy-to-use website.
By doing this, it’s a matter of time before you start ranking high in the results pages, and you make a name for yourself in your industry and a lot more money!
