Is affordable small business SEO possible? Can you build a solid website presence on $100 a week? Yes, and here’s how.
Phase 1 Research and Website
Weeks 1-2 – Cost $200
Research – before spending any other money, you need to know:
Major keywords and keyword phrases
Long-Tail Keyword Phrases
Traffic for Keyword Terms
SEO Competition
Weeks 3-7 – Cost $500
Build your new website or structure your existing site for customers and SEO. If you’re on a budget, don’t spend thousands of dollars for a website. I can build you a website like this one (SEO10x.com) for $300-$500 that’s SEO friendly and ready for content. The final cost will depend on how much work is required to create images and skeleton content.
Phase 2 – Content Creation
Week 7 – Cost $100
Content Plan
Create the content plan for initial content and the next three months. We don’t plan any further at this point until we see what’s working and what’s not.
Weeks 8-16 – Cost $800
Initial Content
From the research phrase, you’ll have chosen major categories, major keyword and secondary and long-tail keywords. Now, it’s time to create SEO content, but more importantly content for you prospects and customers. These pages should be optimized for SEO with internal linking based on the Content Plan.
We are talking about quality content, not $10-15 articles from India or The Philippines. The focus is on two pages / posts per week. At the end of that time, we should have the following:
- About Page
- Contact Page
- Privacy Page
- Category 1 with 5 supporting pages
- Category 2 with 5 supporting pages
- Category 3 with 5 supporting pages
Using this content, we will have created 45-60 optimized internal links, and we now have pages for external links.
Phase 3 – Rank and Grow Traffic
Week 17 – Cost $100
Targeting Keyword Campaigns
We are going to target no more than 2-3 keyword terms at a time for ranking. However, we will associate secondary keywords and long-tail keywords with these targets. That way we’ll achieve rankings for more terms while pushing up our targeted main terms. If the keywords you after are highly competitive, we may target only one term at a time.
Weeks 17-to Ranking/Traffic – Costs $100/week
In phase 3, it’s about building more content and links back to our pages. The time required will be based on competition for the different terms. Here’s what you should expect on a rotating basis:
- Website Content to build out categories or additional categories.
- Articles for distribution to syndication sites like EZine Articles.
- Links from Social Media sites and profiles
- Twitter Posts
- Facebook Page
- Other link sources
Phase 4 – After Ranking and Traffic Achieved
After traffic and rankings are achieved, we will need to do work to maintain the results. The level of maintenance work will be based again on the competition and what they’re doing. You may be able to cut your weekly cost to 1/2 or even a 1/3. Regardless, you’ll need to continue creating content and driving links to your site.
Accelerating The Process
If you’re after a term like New York City Real Estate, you’re going to have a lot of difficulty ranking on a budget. The terms is worth thousands of dollars a month and is worth spending a lot of money on to rank.
However, local SEO in smaller communities is much more achievable. If you’re looking to rank for your local dentist’s or doctor’s office, a local bakery, or a local restaurant, you’ll probably be doing pretty well within six months and real well within a year. If you don’t have a year, the plan is the same, you just spend more to accelerate the process.
You can also inject more juice into the process by generating content within your business. You or one of your employees can write two or three posts or pages a week, post to Twitter, go to forums and become part of the community and more. Each of these actions will accelerate the process. You may need to pay a few hundred dollars for a morning of training, but it will be worth it.
Affordable Small Business SEO is possible. Indeed many small businesses will pay too much for questionable results. Look at this plan. If you have any questions, call Mike Byrne at 386-295-2049 or contact me by email for small business SEO services.
