For business owners who have large or even unlimited budgets, it could be that they overlook SEO and go straight to paid advertising to drive traffic to their website. Alternatively, they might employ the services of a large SEO agency and get them to undertake every ranking tactic in the book. However, not every business starts out with an endless supply of money, so what to do?
SEO Sydney Pro advise that if you are starting a new business, with a new website, and are operating with a small budget, there are plenty of actions you can take in relation to the site’s SEO and subsequent ranking. The key is that you take a logical and planned approach to this so that each tactic you employ, compliments and supports the others.
The first part of the plan should focus on setting up all the technical elements, which using automobile terminology, could be referred to as the workings under the bonnet. You should sign up for, and set up, accounts for Google’s Search Console and Bing’s Webmaster Tools, which you’ll be pleased to know costs nothing. These tools will provide you with lots of essential data to help your SEO activities.
The next step is to create an optimized XML sitemap and submit it to Bing and Google. Before submitting this, you must ensure that your website’s ‘robot.txt’ is set to allow the search engines’ spiders to crawl your website rather than disallowing them. Another element you should have in place is that your website should have an SSL certificate so that it has ‘https’ rather than ‘http’ protocol.
If you have already started building your website and adding content, then there are two additional technical aspects of your website that you should start to implement. One is the linking structure and whilst there may not be many links and URLs in a new website, even at this stage you should be optimising internal links with regards to SEO.
The other technical matter is making sure that your website is built to be mobile responsive. This is especially important as Google is now placing greater emphasis on mobile searches than they are for desktop searches.
Beyond the ‘tech’ aspect of SEO, the emphasis switches to your on-page SEO. This will primarily relate to the content you create and publish. Before creating it, you need to do keyword research. There are both free and paid for research tools which can point you towards those keywords that are most relevant within your niche or business category. They can also give you an insight into the keywords your competitors are using.
As you move to create your content you should do so using a content creation plan so that it is added to your website logically rather than in some haphazard manner. This way you can ensure on-page SEO factors like titles, descriptions and tags are optimised, and that you also add internal links to content in the most effective way.
Now that you are moving forward with the on-site optimisation of your website, you now need to turn to what can be done off-site. The easiest of these is to set up the social media accounts and pages that you want to have, bearing in mind that some are more conducive to building audiences than others.
Beyond this, you must establish a strategy to build backlinks to your website. Part of this will be to identify high authority websites which you believe you should be able to link from. This may involve creating guest posts or contributing to forums, but beyond these are a multitude of ways it can be done. One thing to note is that you should build your links, steadily and naturally.