If you are familiar with SEO or site optimization for search engines, you must know that site SEO requires a budget. The amount of this budget completely depends on the business area and of course, the strategies defined by the SEO specialist.
However, it is very normal that as an SEO expert or specialist, you will sometimes face a lack of budget. Lack of funds may have several reasons. Many times the cause of the lack of an SEO budget is beyond the SEO expert’s control. He has no choice but to cope with the situation and manage the SEO process.
In this article, we would like to introduce 7 strategies for site SEO management that should be done when faced with a lack of SEO budget.
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Why do we sometimes face a lack of SEO budget?
Lack of funds is one of the common and significant challenges that most businesses face. This is especially the case when we are faced with various factors such as intense competition in the industry, sudden changes in the market, economic recession, or the outbreak of an epidemic.
In this situation, the creativity of the SEO specialist is challenged. He should turn this challenge of lack of funds into a great opportunity for business so that he can successfully pass the conditions and ensure the stability and growth of the site’s SEO with creativity, innovation, and the use of smarter solutions.
1. Market demand analysis
When a business operates in a certain area, it is very important to understand what different factors affect the marketing budget, especially website SEO, and how these factors are related to the business and market conditions in that area. When SEO budgets are reduced or limited, SEO professionals must change their work routine. He needs careful analysis to understand whether the demand for the products or services of that business has generally decreased.
In other words, the SEO specialist should check that
- Are fewer people looking for that brand’s product or service?
- Are fewer customers searching and buying or not?
- Did people used to prefer that service but at some point decided not to use it anymore?
These analyses help SEO professionals understand how changes in SEO budgets and performance affect business sales. According to this information, he can choose more suitable strategies and adapt himself to the digital marketing team.
2. Review goals
As SEO budgets shrink, overall business goals need to be re-examined more closely. Even if market conditions haven’t changed, when we have less budget or resources, we need to re-evaluate expectations:
- Can we do the same things we were doing before with less budget or
- Can we work with fewer resources and still be successful in SEO?
For example, the SEO specialist may have to reduce the rate of website content production or make changes in areas such as technical SEO, external SEO, link building, or SEO strategies in general. However, even if the market demand has not changed, one should know that the expectation of SEO results will not be the same as before and the SEO of the site will experience a noticeable drop. In other words, if the SEO expert is asked to work with fewer resources, he must be aware of the challenges that will appear in front of him.
As a result, it is better to review the marketing goals and share them with other members of the marketing team and adjust the new goals according to the amount of budget and resources.
3. Manage online activities
When we have limited budgets and resources, it is better to manage our activities in the digital world. If market demand is down, we should look for where people are still present and focus on that.
Another way to manage SEO tasks is to focus on a limited list of keywords, not all keywords. This will focus only on the part of products or services that are more profitable in this situation.
If we are short on resources and time, we will probably have to postpone or even not make strategic and tactical decisions that we would otherwise make. As a result, we may not be able to fully optimize a website. Therefore, we should focus on the part that is most important in terms of profitability and postpone the rest.
This approach leads the business to focus on more important and strategic issues in the context of a limited budget and helps to get the best possible result with limited resources.
4. Outsourcing
SEO is not possible without collaboration with others, especially when we have limited resources and budgets. To do SEO work, especially implementing technical changes, website design, content creation, etc., we need a large number of people with different expertise.
In the past, an SEO expert could do zero to one hundred SEO sites. But now, due to the changes that have happened in the world of SEO, the need to collaborate more with others is necessary.
Either way, when budgets get tight, we need to prioritize and allocate resources and budgets in a way that will help us the most and weed out ineffective ones.
5. Short-term planning
When faced with a limited SEO budget, you need to focus on and plan for your short-term goals. This may seem simple. But don’t forget that SEO is a complex process. Therefore, you should avoid focusing on details and complexities.
The SEO expert should know what actions to take in the short term and try to stop long-term goals for now and focus on short-term goals. If he wants to get results in a short period and take the site’s SEO to an acceptable level, he must go for strategies that give the business the best chance for success.
6. Long-term strategy
If you want to focus on the short-term goals we mentioned above, but also have an eye on the future and long-term goals, if you still have some of your SEO budget left over, you can invest it in your long-term SEO goals.
This issue especially when the business sector has completely declined and your competitors have also suffered budget reductions, it helps you to get ahead of them in this chaotic situation.
As a result, if after identifying short-term goals and allocating part of the budget for it, there is still some budget left over, you can spend it on longer-term goals such as updating and improving infrastructure and website technology tools.
7. Performance evaluation
After implementing all of these things, the SEO expert should have data to understand what is going on. Data including information about site SEO performance and progress. In general, data analysis and site statistics help the SEO expert to understand the relationship between different factors more deeply.
This is where the real effects of various events such as economic recession or budget cuts on SEO strategies are revealed. For this reason, data analysis helps the SEO specialist and digital marketing team to plan better for the future and make more effective decisions.