Affordable SEO Services for Small Business

You don’t have to spend a lot to rank in google. There are affordable SEO services for small business you can utilize.

91% of US Internet users search every month, and you are missing out on a ton of online real estate by not incorporating SEO.

We have provided affordable SEO services to our clients since 2015 and have gained profound insight into working on a budget.

We took our Website, TechNerds Inc, from19 referring domains to 200 referring domains, in less than six months. All of this without spending a lot on expensive SEO tools and Sponsored Posts.

This article will break down the tried and tested services that we do for our clients. Let’s get into it:

What Affordable SEO Services for Small Business you require?

According to the industry, the SEO services that you need will vary.

Have you got a brick-and-mortar shop? Does your business entail providing services such as plumbing, or are you an affiliate or blogger? What about an online business such as consulting?

A general list of the services needed are as follows:

On-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO
Video SEO
Ecommerce SEO

Small businesses lag on quality content and promotion.

Quality websites can be built these days quickly using templates and content management systems like WordPress, but quality content isn’t always easy to write.

Benefits of Starting an SEO Campaign

A consumer who has a problem will search the web for answers and solutions. Google’s powerful algorithms bring relevant results to the surface.

Only around 2% of clicks go to links on pages two and beyond search engine results pages (SERPs). The top three positions receive the majority of traffic.

SEO best practices help your website rank highly in the SERPs, increasing the amount of traffic it receives, which means the number of sales should rise.

Optimizing your website with SEO is one of the simplest and most affordable ways to increase brand awareness online on a shoe-string budget.

The majority of the advice in this article requires little to no resources except time and mental energy.

Why Some Websites Lose Rankings After Breaking Up with An SEO Service Provider?

After cutting ties with the old SEO agency, many clients say they’ve lost massive traffic.

This is one of the biggest concerns for small businesses.

They use your monthly payment to build links with little effort. Their links are bought, and they pay a monthly premium to make sure that these links exist.

In the SEO industry, saturation has reached a point, and many companies will boast about achieving top positions for their customers.

After stopping the retainer program, the link is no longer active, and the client starts to see a drop in rank.

As a result, it is strongly recommended that small businesses hire manual blogger outreach services instead of building links.

As part of blogger outreach, SEO agencies are responsible for manually reaching out to bloggers in niche industries, ensuring that any brand mentions will remain in place even if you decide to break away.

Ensure you explain your requirements to the agencies you reach out to and make the decision by comparing their merits. You can see a sample of the outreach email below.

Here are the services you can choose to maximize your business’ ROI now that you know how to find affordable SEO services for small businesses.

You can find many articles on Google that teach you how to rank higher.

Although tips and tricks might work temporarily, your small business needs a concrete SEO strategy to deliver results.

Optimizing your small business for Google can be done in several ways, but the results aren’t quantifiable.

To choose result-focused SEO services, you need to ensure they deliver results.

Let’s walk through the SEO services in more detail:

Types of Affordable SEO Services for Small Businesses

Technical SEO

URL and Site structure:

It is the process of ensuring that a site meets the technical challenges of modern search engine algorithms to improve its organic ranking.

Crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architecture are all essential to technical SEO.

Your site is only as good as its content.

But if your technical SEO is lacking?

Then you’re not going to rank.

To be of use to Google and other search engines, your website needs to be able to find, crawl, render, and index its pages.

The first step in any technical SEO campaign, I believe, is the structure of your site.

Why?

Generally, crawling and indexing issues occur because of poor site structure, so get it right in this process, and you’ll have fewer problems with Google indexing your page content.

Secondly, your site structure influences everything you do to optimize your site… from your sitemap to URLs to use the robots.txt file to block individual pages for a search engine.

You need to have a flat website architecture with all the pages linking to one another. The bigger the website, the more importance your website architecture plays.

You can use tools like visual mind mapper to help you make sense of the website architecture.

Make sure to add breadcrumbs navigation to your website to have natural internal links pointing to different pages on the website.

Here is the bottom line here: if you have a strong structure, all other technical SEO tasks are manageable.

Minimize the size of your web page

The faster you load your site, the better your rankings will be.

It doesn’t mean you’ll attain Google’s top spot with a fast loading site. Backlinks still require a pat in the back.

Nevertheless, moving your site’s load speed up can boost your organic traffic.

Backlinko, a famous SEO consultant, did a study in which he concluded the webpage’s size as the most critical factor in page speed.

You need to minimize the amount of bloat your webpage contains. The bloat is unnecessary code coupled with heavy images.

An ecommerce website will require compressed Images served in WebP format. A blog will require the same changes.

Different scenarios will require different strategies for webpage size minification, so choose accordingly.

Use canonical URLs

Duplicate pages should get a no-index tag put on them or have duplicates replaced with unique ones.

There’s another alternative: canonical URLs.

It is best to use canonical URLs for pages that share similar content… with some minor deviations.

You add rel = “canonical” to your URL in HTML. Let’s say you run an e-commerce store that sells shoes.

You have a particular page set up just for runners.

The setup of your website may result in different URLs for different sizes, colors, and variations.

Different URLs for different sizes, colors, and variations

That’s bad.

Google understands that your product page’s main version is the one you use, so you can use the canonical tag to let it know. We call it the main version. And then all the variations are subtypes.

I hope you understood the reference.

Build your 404 page

You need to have a custom 404 page that you will use on those pages that are building or undergoing maintenance.

It is an essential technical mistake that a lot of rookies make. We aren’t rookies, are we?

Caching

Your website will load more quickly if you use caching. Again, caching can be achieved for free using plugins like W3 Total Cache or Autoptimize.

Some hosting companies have LiteSpeed Caching available to their customers; allowing you to cache content properly.

Structured Data

Small business owners should avoid focusing on this. However, in some instances, it may be necessary.

A few of your pages could benefit from Rich Snippets using Schema.

Rich Snippets can drastically improve the organic click-through rate since they stand out in the SERPs.

Keep in mind that it is more important to focus on quality content and promotion than technical aspects.

These tools can save you a lot of time on Technical SEO issues:

WordPress

With regards to SEO, WordPress is one of the best affordable solutions for small businesses.

A powerful, easy-to-manage, mobile-friendly website that can help you maximize your potential won’t cost you lots of money.

There are many WordPress themes for an excellent design, many of which come for free. Web Designers are usually quite expensive; that’s why you ought to use WordPress.

Sure, Wix or Squarespace are great SaaS website builders (you have probably seen the ads already), but they don’t allow you to do that much for affordable SEO services for small businesses.

GTMetrix

You can use GT-Metrix to discover a variety of technical SEO issues your website is likely to face.

It is essential to address the big image issue and caching.

Google Lighthouse

Just like GT Metrix, Google offers a similar tool, called Lighthouse.

Lighthouse provides a list of the technical issues they think you should fix.

The most important one, again, is the speed at which your website’s most crucial element loads (First Contentful Paint and Time to interactive)

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is a freemium tool that you can use to see your website’s technical issues.

It will show you all your titles, meta descriptions, alt tags, and every element associated with on-page SEO.

You can download the free version and crawl up to 500 URLs under the open plan.

Google Search Console

Search Console is a free tool provided by Google to see the technical performance of a website. You can see the diagnostic information for your website on it.

Use GSC to see if you are ranking for the keywords you are targeting and if the website is performing responsively on mobiles.

We have discussed the technical issues in detail; let’s get going to the most crucial variable, content.

On-Page SEO

Content Marketing

A sound On-page SEO strategy rests on a solid keyword research plan.

If you do not know what people are searching for, you will not know what to optimize your pages on.

Your SEO campaign would be wayward without keywords: they tell you where to go and whether or not you’re succeeding.

Additionally, doing keyword research helps you to get a better understanding of your target audience. That’s because keyword research gives you valuable information on what customers are looking for… and the specific words they use.

Otherwise put: keyword research reflects modern-day market research.

Copywriting

A decent copywriter will not come cheap, it is imperative you pay him/her so that you get what will rank. If your website is just starting, you’ll want a good copy that sells.

Sure, a content marketing strategy has fundamentals on information, not sales, but what if you could give out information that sells? That’s where copywriting kicks in.

Write copy that sells your product and convinces prospective clients to take action. That is the art and science of copywriting.

It’s like hiring one salesman to reach all your customers. Copywriting is an essential skill for affordable SEO services for small business. Sales teams contact each customer individually; a copywriter comes to everyone instantly via billboards, magazine ads, sales letters, blog posts, and more.

Optimize your URLs

There is a lot of conflicting information on URL structure out there.

Essentially, URL categorization has two basic types:

Static
Dynamic

Static URLs remain the same as long as no changes are made within the HTML. Dynamic URLs change and include parameters.

These sites have consistent URL structures — and consistency is essential for ranking.

Dynamic URLs is the reason why you should always use static URLs over those with parameters. So always use static URLs.

You should also keep your URL short when composing your URL.

Google tends to rank short URLs higher on their first page, so use short URLs.

Users trust shorter URLs and are more likely to share them, enhancing the user experience.

Format your copy and title tags

The title tag of a page is an HTML element that specifies a page’s title.

A title tag must entice readers to click-through from the search engine results page (SERPs) to your blog post.

Additional reasons why title tags are essential include:

Title tags make for first impressions: These are what potential visitors look at when they search; so this is your chance to make an excellent first impression;

Brand leverage: Your brand name has a significant impact on whether people click through to your page. If you’re a household name in your industry, indicate your brand’s name in your title tag. Often, this leads to more clicks.

Among other things, Google looks to your page’s title tag to help make sense of your page.

There’s likely a connection between keyword usage and rankings due to the title tag.

Although title tags are not complicated, they require a bit of time and effort to get right.

Even though they aren’t perfect, you still need to test them and improve on them continually.

Add images and alt tags.

Images are one of the most essential factors in making your article a success. If you can’t visualize your points effectively, you miss out on a ton of online real estate.

Your images need to be crisp and colorful. Adding alt tags to the pictures help google crawlers understand what the picture is saying.

It also makes your website accessible to people who can’t see, so adding an alt tag is a win-win for all parties.

Use internal and external links.

The internal links on your website will take the reader to a specific place on your website, but the external links will direct the reader to a dedicated page on a different site.

Internal and external linking is essential to being 1st in SEO. They help you link different pages on your website with each other.

Linking to external websites add credibility to what you are saying and increases your trustworthiness.

In this way, links are like votes of trust, legitimacy, or authority. The more votes that a page gets, the higher its ranking will be.

Editorial Calendar

You need to make a calendar for your content. Scheduling content helps you to defer multitasking and decreases the anxiety you feel to come up with the content on the fly.

How should an editorial calendar look for SEO services?

A calendar of important dates (events, seasons, holidays, etc.)
Topics (subtopics also may be relevant)
The frequency of posting (weekly, monthly, etc.)
Distributed via primary channels (website, social media, etc.)

Organize your brilliant ideas into an editorial calendar, which will save you time when it comes to writing.

You won’t need to reinvent the wheel if you know how much and what kind of content you need every month.

Have the right tools to help you rank for the keywords you want. Some of the tools that deserve mention are:

Grammarly
Hemingway app
Copyscape
Wordtune
Ahrefs

We have discussed Content Writing in detail; let’s get going into Off-Page SEO and why it is crucial.

Off-Page SEO Services

Link Building

Off-Page SEO covers the process of generating backlinks to your website. Backlinks are a vote of confidence for your website’s content.

There are a couple of tactics that you can utilize you streamline the process.

Use the link reclamation tool.

Sometimes, links on the website break. This link can be reclaimed by emailing the website’s owner and asking them to remove the broken link and adding yours.

This technique only works on those contextually similar links to the web page you want it to link. It has been a challenge to build quality links following Google’s guidelines for years now.

This technique makes it easier to identify paths to enter a website’s ecosystem and use it to your advantage.

You can use tools such as the Ahrefs toolbar extension or Check My Links. They help you identify the 404 errors.

Analyze your competitor’s Links

You’ll notice that many of your competitors are doing some things very well, especially those that are ranking high in search results.

Why not take advantage of what they’re doing to up your own ranking?

You can use tools like Ahrefs to identify what backlinks your competitors are using to rank high.

Even more than that, you can use the Unnatural Link detection to filter bad links and focus only on the best ones.

You can also use it for competitive analysis, to see where you are positioned compared to your competitors.

This can help you identify websites ranking to multiple competitors, indicating that it might be easier to obtain. All of this is necessary for Affordable SEO Services for Small Business.

Blog Commenting

It may seem like this is a spammy strategy to some, but it doesn’t have to be.

Engaging with websites and blogs talking about topics relevant to your business and the topics they cover is all part of online marketing.

In many ‘affordable’ SEO packages you’ll see companies tout blog commenting, but you’d better be careful as a lot of the time, those services are spam.

We’re striving to build connections with others who are active in the market and maybe land a deal with them to promote our website.

Guest Posting

Guest Posting is when you write an article for another website, under your name. Usually, you’ll be able to link back to your website.

A guest blogger, also known as “guest posting,” is an individual who contributes content to another website’s content. Usually, a guest blogger will write for the blogs of companies within the same industry to Increase website traffic.

By engaging with relevant bloggers through blog commenting, you might get to know a blogger well enough to ask them for a guest post.

It is now considered a dangerous practice to expand this, but in moderation, it does not result in any adverse effects.

Outreach

Link exchanges and guest posts may also be acquired by direct outreach.

The best way to build a connection with someone is to be yourself. Sincerity is the best way and I’ve had the most success with that.

Get a response by providing something and not asking for anything in return. Once you have a response, you can ask for something, but don’t be pushy.

You should appreciate it when you get your hands on a free link. Links on websites can cost hundreds of dollars.

Blogging (with a twist)

Search engine optimization can be really useful through content marketing when used right, but only writing relevant content won’t work on its own.

Your articles need to be interesting for readers and that’s no easy task.

If you’re looking to reach influencers or for a different approach, write about a feature or a funny thing, for instance. Otherwise, you’ll want to connect with the media.

However, regardless of whether blogging or content marketing leads to links, it still consolidates and optimizes your website’s structure.

Social Media Management is a tricky thing. You need to focus your efforts on where your target audience resides. So, Make sure to bring your A-Game to the social media that matters the most.

I would choose LinkedIn to target Entrepreneurs and Facebook if I am selling products. It all depends where is

Solicit reviews and ratings to build trust

In order to potray your expertise online, you need to gather positive reviews about your product or service.

Services such as Google My Business and Yelp help in building that customer relationship and your future customer will frequent these places to get a feel for your services.

Reach out to influencers

It may seem that some “great content” doesn’t appear to be making an impact, no matter how much effort and time you put into creating it.

Is there any way to be sure that your content marketing doesn’t go unnoticed? How can you keep your head above water, and finally get your hands on the top marketers?

You’ll have the best chance at success if you ride along with those influencers.

A marketer can establish stronger connections with influential individuals who will help them grow within a niche.

Those individuals may also help in identifying additional consumers who may find value in your products and/or services.

Now, you maybe asking, I have hired influencers and did all of that reviews and link-building stuff. Have I started ranking on the keywords which will actually bring me traffic?

You need a rank tracker or keyword rank tracker for that.

You need a rank tracking tool for affordable SEO services for small businesses. Google Search Console will help rank tracking of your keywords. Paid tools such as Ahrefs will also help you with the task.

Let’s go to Local SEO which is necessary for small businesses.

Affordable Local SEO services

46% of all Google searches relate to local results.

Despite this, 56% of local merchants haven’t even claimed their Google My Business listing.

Google My Business optimization is one of the cornerstones of local SEO. 56% of businesses have not yet claimed their GMB listing, so we doubt they have done much else.

Although it’s a good idea to claim your Google My Business listing, local SEO goes MUCH deeper than that.

A Google My Business listing could be the most important ranking factor for local SEO, but other listings such as Bing Places or an Apple Maps listing should also be taken into account.

Here is how you will go about making your GMB listing:

Step 1. Enter Your Business Name

Step 2. Enter Your Address

Step 3. Enter Your Exact Location

Step 4. Choose a Category

Step 5. Enter Your Phone Number and Website (Optional)

Step 6. Verify Your Listing

Step 7. Optimize Your Listing Further

Citations & Accurate NAP

Citations are online mentions of your business, which usually display your business name, address, and phone number—collectively known as NAP (Name, Address, Phone).

There are two main types of citations: structured and unstructured.

A structured citation is generally found on directories, social profiles, etc. that present NAP information in a structured manner.

A structural citation is one that displays NAP information in a visually-structured way. It is common to find them on business directories, social networks, etc.

Usually, unstructured citations are references to your business that are not in a structured format (surprising, right!?). They are likely to exist in blog posts, in newspaper articles, in business blogs, etc.

Make it easy for customers to contact you

Your contact information should be displayed clearly on your website and physical premises. These links should be clickable and easy to use.

Add structured location data to your website

Google, Bing, and other search engines use structured data to better understand what a web page is about. …

Rich snippets, so-called structured data for search engines, can greatly improve the user experience.

An Introduction to Structured Data for a Website:

The Structured Data Markup Helper can be found at Google Resources.
Enter the URL in the URL field.
Mark up elements on the page and apply data tags.
Create a HTML document.
Put schema markup on your page.
The Google Structured Data Testing Tool can help you test your markup.

Video SEO Services

The purpose of video SEO is to optimize your video to appear in search engine results for relevant search terms.

There aren’t many affordable seo services for small business that can optimize videos. Once you’ve published it, it’s done.

The title and description can be tweaked to better optimize them, but you need to create them correctly from the outset.

Following are a few tips on using video in video SEO or in addition to your current content marketing strategy.

Keyword Research

It is just as important as regular SEO for you to know what people are searching for before you make your video. It can be difficult to find a topic that matches a keyword, but try your best to do so. This way, you’ll get the best of both worlds.

Optimized titles & descriptions

Use the identified keywords in your title and description. Don’t cheap out on the description, even if not many people will read it. Populate it with complementary info such as links to sources.

Short Product Presentation Clips

Whenever you sell products online, make sure you have videos of them. People are busy, so this makes them more likely to watch them. Now, you can do almost everything with a phone. There is a plethora of video editing software on both Android and Apple.

Consistency

Getting real success with video will require you to post clips on a regular basis, if you want to rank high for your target keywords.

Interlinking between videos

There is no doubt that a lot of video content is made on YouTube. And YouTube wants to keep its audience on the site, so create videos that relate to one another.

Keep people on YouTube by directing them from one video to another, and YouTube will reward you.

Repurpose content

You can use your blog posts as the basis for videos. Then, interlink the videos with your blog posts. You can do the same vice versa, if you’ve focused your efforts on videos instead.

Choose attractive thumbnail images

Your videos will only get clicked if your thumbnails are attractive. There are some best practices that you need to follow.

Always opt for bright colors: This is a good rule of thumb. …
A human face in the thumbnail is always preferable whenever possible. …
You Could Take Action Shots: …
Add Text: …
Brand your Business: …

Customize your YouTube channel

Channels can be laid out in such a way that visitors see your channel trailer, featured video, and featured section on the channel’s homepage.

Create a channel trailer for new viewers

Your channel trailer gives viewers a glimpse into what’s on your channel, so they can learn more and subscribe.

Create an eye-catching and appealing intro video. For instance, you can use apps like free youtube intro maker, where you can find some amazing video templates to create amazing intro videos.

If your video contains content that’s not claimed by your channel, ads will not appear on your video trailer. Subscribed viewers will see your featured video.

Featured sections

The channel homepage can be customized with up to 10 sections. By default, your homepage will display 3 pre-populated sections: Uploads, Playlists you’ve Created, and Subscriptions you’ve Made Public.

Ecommerce SEO

Here are a few interesting stats…

44% of online shoppers start with a Google search.

Organic traffic accounts for 23.6% of all ecommerce orders.

Here is the process every Ecommerce SEO follows:

Research keywords to see what customers are searching for.
Your keyword research will help you design a site architecture.
Content optimization through meta tag and meta content optimization.
Optimize your site for search engines to ensure they can crawl it and index it.
Drive local organic traffic with local SEO (if you own a brick and mortar).
Additional organic visitors can be driven by content marketing.
You can improve your website’s authority by increasing the number of links it has.
The tools used to measure SEO success include Google Analytics and Ahrefs.

It is imperative for e-commerce websites to rank higher than their competitors and to display their products correctly in order for potential customers to click your site in the SERPs, rather than that of their competitors.

How to Pick The Right SEO Company to Work With

The task of finding a good SEO company is harder than finding a good full-service SEO agency, but there are many excellent options out there.

Having a hard time choosing the right SEO company? Don’t worry, we’ve done all the work for you. We’ve researched the best method to choosing the right SEO company.

How to choose a good SEO company?

Look at the SEO agency’s past performance
Ask past or current clients about their experience
Meet the SEO company and ask questions

Clutch, a platform that helps companies find SEO partners, is a nice platform to see the SEO platforms that performing the best. There are multiple filters that you can apply such as no of reviews and location.

White hat vs. black hat SEO

What Is White Hat SEO?

White hat means treating your website as if it contains only “legal” content and following search engine guidelines.

What Is Black Hat SEO?

It’s risky, but it works. Until it doesn’t. It involves illegal practices that go against the guidelines from search engines to more dangesearch engines’ guidelines penalties from search engines).

What distinguishes black hat SEO from white hat SEO is whether you are acting in accordance with the search engines’ guidelines.

It is not a guarantee that white hat tactics will work.

In a search engine’s ideal world, all websites would adhere to the same set of rules, but they don’t.

Thus, competitors who employ black hat tactics will not be able to rank highly if your brand is in a highly competitive industry.

It is possible to get high rankings through PBNs, but you might need to sacrifice some ranking spots under these circumstances.

Most SEO falls into the gray zone, and it may not be so easy to identify white hat and black hat methods.

SEO campaigns that use black hat techniques carry substantial risks. You can never expose a website to risk if the owner of it doesn’t understand the risks.

Tips for hiring an SEO specialist

Look for the following factors when considering hiring affordable SEO services for your small business:

SEO Agency’s Credibility
Check Their Blog Section
Online Reviews
Ask Them Which Tools They Use
Check the Quality of Content
Check the In-House Team

Where can I get affordable SEO services for a small business?

This question is highly situational and depends on where your business is situated. If you are sitting in the USA, it is understood that you will get affordable SEO services in those cities where the cost of living is cheaper.

Places like Florida and Missouri come to mind when I think of this. It would help if you outsourced your SEO needs to a competent guy sitting in these areas. TechNerds is situated in Miami, Florida, and can provide you with complete SEO guidance for your small business.

What is the best SEO for a small business?

I have tried to make a case for every SEO that is out there. Once again, this is a highly situational question that will only be answered after a deep audit of your website.

Some common themes that are found in every website include Technical Optimization and On-Page SEO, so if you had to ask me, I will go with them.

How Affordable SEO Services for Small Business bring ROI?

You will rank for the keywords your customer is searching on Google. Your website’s organic traffic will increase. Some customers will eventually find you competent enough to give you a business that will generate profit.

What kind of questions you should be asking your SEO consultant?

Getting an affordable SEO service indicates that you’re willing to invest money, so you’re probably in search of an SEO firm.

Many cheap services can be bad, for example, spun content, cheap links or PBNs.

You should speak to an SEO expert in the company before signing.

Get the SEO audit as soon as possible, but be sure that it isn’t automated.

If they do not know anything about your business, they cannot properly promote you. How else will they know how to promote you?

To begin with, ask if the techniques are what most SEO’s would call ‘white hat’ or safe.

If the response is no… I think that you know how to proceed.

In addition, the following questions must also be addressed:

Do you use Spam?
Have you ever used PBNs in the past?
Do you use automation tools? If yes, which ones?

If the company claims to use automation tools, then you may want to avoid them. Some, like ones for sending out e-mail newsletters or writing posts, are fine, but others, like those for scraping or spinning content, are not.

Additionally, you should ask the SEO firm:

What has been your experience in the field?
Do you have instances of prior optimizations of websites? If so, what techniques have you used on them?
Are real people going to analyze the project or at least analyze it?
What content will be created for my website?
Is there a way to ascertain the success of the SEO campaign?
Would you be able to let me know where precisely my money will go? Would you be performing the entire job, or will you outsource it?

A knowledgeable and clear response to these queries is a good indication that the person you will be working with is well-intentioned and understands what they’re doing. We hope that we covered all of the Affordable SEO Services for Small Business.

However, not only should you decide on who to work with, but you should also understand how to prefer good affordable SEO services for your small business.