How to Maximize Your SEO Budget During Downtimes
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For many businesses, economic downturns require cutting marketing budgets. But scaling back your SEO efforts can hurt your rankings and traffic. With some strategic planning, you can optimize your limited SEO budget to maintain and even improve your organic presence.
Prioritize High-Impact SEO Tactics
Focus your budget on the SEO activities that offer the greatest return on investment. On-page optimization, content creation, and link building are essential.
For on-page SEO, make sure you optimize page titles, headings, meta descriptions, image alt text, and internal links. This improves the user experience and helps search engines understand your content. Tools like Yoast SEO can streamline on-page optimization.
Publishing new, relevant content also yields significant SEO value. Focus on long-form content like guides, FAQs, and tutorials that comprehensively cover a topic. Promote your content through social media and email newsletters to maximize reach.
Outreach for high-quality backlinks from authority sites is worth the investment. Prioritize your top landing pages and pieces of anchor content for link building.
Leverage Free SEO Tactics
When budgets are tight, double down on free SEO methods. Here are some options:
- Optimize existing content by refreshing old blogs, guides, etc. Add newer examples, data, images, videos, etc.
- Pursue no-cost links via guest posts on relevant sites. Identify sites accepting contributor submissions.
- Build links by creating resources others will want to reference, like lists, stats, templates, etc.
- Develop internal links between related content to strengthen on-site optimization.
- Clean up technical issues like site speed, broken links, metadata errors. Leverage free tools like Google Search Console.
- Produce new cornerstone content around your highest-value keywords to bolster authority.
- Identify link building opportunities in competitors’ unlinked brand mentions and broken links.
