You know you need SEO for your business to shine, but you don’t have the expertise in-house, nor do you have the money to outsource it. That puts you and your business in a tough place.
In this article, we’ll explore how you can make strides with SEO, even if you have to do it on a shoestring budget. But first, let’s start with the basics.
Table of Contents
What is Search Engine Optimization?
In simple terms, SEO means improving your site so that people find your pages when they perform relevant searches. SEO allows you to earn higher visibility in search results. This helps you to gain traffic and better visibility organically. Focus on SEO means to be search engine friendly and highly relevant to the searcher’s query.
What is Technical SEO?
The technical SEO happens in the background. The immediate actions taken to improve a site’s search rankings are known as technical SEO. That not only dives into the technical aspects of SEO, but it also explains everything in detail, from the nuts and bolts to advanced topics like keyword analysis and web structure.
So, with these two definitions in mind, let’s take a look at the technical SEO you could potentially identify and how you should approach them, especially if you’re operating on a shoestring budget.
Identify the List of Technical SEO Issues that You Have Identified.
When it comes to fixing your site’s SEO issues, you must first identify them. If you have had a technical audit performed previously, you are already ahead of the game. The first step is to organize the issues on the list into a spreadsheet. Next, include a column so you can categorize each fixable issue.
After you’ve finished these tasks, add a column with checkboxes so you can rapidly check off the completed tasks. This is exactly the process followed by top digital marketing consultants.
Leverage the Power of an SEO Tool
There is no need to worry if you haven’t had a recent site audit. There is no way you can afford one if you’re operating on a tight budget. Fortunately, there are some great SEO tools that you can use to help you find some of the most common technical SEO issues. To identify problems such as a lousy HTTPS implementation, broken or redirected internal links, duplicate content, and missing title tags or H1s, you should use Screaming Frog’s Crawler.
An excellent tool for finding thin content, orphaned content, missing internal links, redirect chains, crawl issues, and other problems on a website is SEMrush’s site audit tool. Not only is this useful for an in-depth audit, but it also enables you to receive updates via email to let you know when new issues arise. Also recommend that you use Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, both available for free. As a digital marketing consultant, I use these tools as well to ensure we have an in-depth analysis to create a strategic marketing plan.
The two search engines tools have proven to be invaluable resources when it comes to research on our websites. Use them; they’re excellent!
Other SEO tools you can use
If you enter site:example.com into your browser, you’ll be able to see plenty of problems. If your site has gotten compromised, you should use this detection script to identify if your site has been hacked quickly.
If you use Google Analytics, you can identify pages on your site that load slowly and start testing optimizations that may help resolve that issue.
One must use the Google Page Speed Tool and Google Lighthouse to verify web pages that take too long to load. On the web, a large image or two can drag down performance significantly. The images may not get compressed. These simple technical fixes are easily fixable, and they’ll have a noticeable impact.
Prioritize the List of Technical SEO Fixes on Your SEO Task List
Once you have compiled your list, separate it into two tabs:
- One for tasks you can handle without the assistance of a developer or SEO
- The other for jobs for which you will need some outsourced SEO help
Take the orders of importance into consideration and arrange them in order of priority. Even if you are not, you may have already had your SEO audit completed for you. If not, you’ll want to prioritize Errors over Warnings in tools like Google Search Console and SEMrush.
Errors should be dealt with first, and then error messages investigated. The less budget you have, seek out a pro’s help just to pinpoint the things you can take on by yourself. Look for a developer who can help you break down each item on your list into small, more manageable tasks.
Poor website design can include issues such as inefficient code and poor code design. Fixing any broken on-page issues, like fixing or removing internal links that result in a 404 error page or redirect chain, should be a priority. You can use a free tool like Ahref’s broken link checker to uncover broken links on your site.
Ensure that header tags, title tags, meta descriptions, and any missing content links get added to orphaned pages. There are the top search engine optimization problems and the solution to overcome them.
Redundant or Duplicate Content
Duplicate content gets commonly seen in the form of substantive blocks of content within or across different domains. Semrush discovered that nearly half of the analyzed content (i.e., the content examined for duplicate content) has issues. Google and similar search engines have a hard time differentiating between different pages when there are multiple pages with similar content. Enter a URL into a tool like Siteliner to find duplicate content.
Badly Formatted Title Tags
In addition to several problems, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) suffers when it comes to title tags. Your tags may suffer when there is duplication, incorrect use of a title tag, or your tags are either too long or too short. Furthermore, page titles and tags aid search engines and visitors in understanding your page’s purpose, so they should be considered a critical part of the optimization process. It is vital to begin with the fundamentals when it comes to title tags.
The first step in optimizing your title tag is to ensure that it is between 50 and 60 characters long and includes at least one of your targeted keywords. Make sure there are no duplicates on your site to avoid technical issues.
Clickable titles contain:
- days
- statistics
- notability
- feeling
Meta Descriptions are not Getting Used
A page’s meta description is a short paragraph that gives visitors a general idea of what your webpage offers. Searchers see their search results and your pages when the keyword you’re targeting appears in the page’s description, so optimizing your meta description for SEO is vital.
Failure to do so often causes poor SEO outcomes for sites that don’t use their meta descriptions (or duplicate them). When you do it well, it is always beneficial to include a meta description (and this will get located at the bottom of each post page on WordPress), and the best result is 150 words or fewer.
Broken Links on your Website
Due to its unique nature, this particular issue isn’t undeniable to search engine optimization (SEO) experts. A small number of broken links is almost unavoidable, but an excessive number of them can spell trouble for your site’s SEO. Since 404 errors are unwelcome, it’s likely to lead to an increase in bounce rates and a decrease in traffic.
As neither of these is optimal for search engine optimization, internal links are beneficial to both SEO and usability. They are also the most accessible links to include because they are already part of your website. An essential tool to find broken links on your site is Screaming Frog. In addition to scanning your URLs for broken links and 404 errors, you can use this to enter your URL, and it will quickly browse your site. You will see which links you should prioritize or which links you need to remove.
Critical Error Message
Like internal links, you don’t want links on your site that intend to take users to a different website leading to a critical error message. Your pages will only appear in search engines if they have working backlinks.
Even though you’d use a search engine optimization (SEO) tool like Screaming Frog to check for broken internal links, you can also use it to find broken external links on your site. While fixing broken backlinks is indeed challenging, one can do it. You should ask the site the link came from to remove it.
Related posts:
- How to Deal with Technical SEO Issues on a Shoestring Budget? - February 23, 2022
