How To Get The Highest ROI From The Least Work? Limited SEO Resources!

In a perfect world of infinite resources… let’s stop right there. The fact is, we don’t live in a perfect world. Unfortunately we have to make tradeoffs on a daily basis. If you are in an ultra-competitive niche, be aware that I would never recommend slacking or downsizing your SEO efforts or budget. However, if you have time and want to get 50% of the value of a professional SEO without too much work, this is the post for you.

On-site Content SEO

Think of your on-site content as what you are saying about yourself. When you include keywords in your content, you are telling the search engines which keywords you think you are relevant for.

If you have 5 minutes to SEO a page, you won’t be able to adequately follow all SEO best practices. Instead, you’re going to look at the few elements on the page that make the biggest difference. Start with your homepage as that is traditionally your most powerful page for SEO, and follow these steps:

Biggest Bang for your Buck

1. Pick a keyword that you want your homepage to be about. This will be a keyword that exactly describes your business, and has search volume. Use Google’s keyword tool to find which keywords have search volume. You will likely rank for your company name anyway, so pick a keyword that someone might actually type into a search engine to find your product or service.

For instance, if your company is Bob’s Auto Repair and your shop is in Cleveland, OH, your keyword should be something like ‘Cleveland auto repair’ or ‘auto repair Cleveland’. Narcissistic keywords like ranking for your own name, or ‘Bob’s auto repair’ are nice, and make you feel great, but they don’t drive business if they don’t have search volume.

2. Change your HTML title tag on your homepage. Take your keyword that you chose in the above instruction, and place it at the very front of your title tag. Then place a separator (hypen, colon, or pipe) and then put your company name. In the above example, the title tag would look like this:

Cleveland Auto Repair | Bob’s Auto Repair
Or if you have access to the HTML: <title>Cleveland Auto Repair | Bob's Auto Repair</title>

Believe it or not, this one element is the single most important on-site optimization you can do to a webpage. It’s a quick win!

3. Change your HTML meta description. Take your same keyword and use it in a couple sentences that describe what you do. Feel free to use 2-3 sentences as long as it stays under 160 characters with spaces. An example:

Need a Cleveland auto repair shop? Our technicians here at Bob’s Auto Repair in Cleveland have 30 years of experience in working on your exact make and model. Or if you have access to the HTML: <meta content="Need a Cleveland auto repair shop? Our technicians here at Bob's Auto Repair in Cleveland have 30 years of experience in working on your exact make and model" />

4. Stick your keyword in the page content. Your pages all likely have a header, and a few paragraphs of text. Take your keyword and put it around. Sprinkle it naturally, because unnatural “keyword stuffing” is going to make your clients turn around and leave.

5. Rinse and Repeat. Do the same thing with your other main pages that you would like visitors to find from search engines. Pick one keyword per page, and assign a keyword for each page that matches a keyword.

Off-site Linking SEO

The other half to Google’s ranking process is how other sites link to yours. You can think of off-site optimizations as what others are saying about you. It should be understood that a site that has been around for years, has a great reputation, and has been linked to thousands of times would be more popular than a site that sprang up yesterday, has no history, and no one has ever referred anyone there. The more popular a site is, the more a link from that site is worth.

Get your blog, other sites, friends’ sites, and any others that you have a relationship with to link to your site. The anchor text of the links (the words that you click on to visit the link), should match the keyword that you chose for the page you are linking to. For instance, if you picked the keyword ‘Denver skydiving’ for your homepage, whenever you create a link to your homepage, try to make the clickable text say ‘Denver skydiving’.

If the keywords on your page (what you say about yourself) are the same keywords in the links to your page (what others say about you), it makes a very powerful statement about your relevance to that keyword in the eyes of a search engine.

Being able to do SEO yourself is awesome, but if you’re trying to run a small business by yourself, you may not have the time to do it adequately. Consider hiring a local internet marketing firm to handle your online marketing.