SEO can be hard if you don’t have any budget to play with. Especially if you’re up against big competitors who have deep pockets. But there are still quite a few techniques that you can utilize with pretty small or no budget at all. In this article we’ll explore a few of these so that even if you don’t have deep pockets, you can get some SEO wins.
Partner with another company to run a competition
This idea can work well if you don’t have budget to buy prizes yourself, or if you can’t afford to give product away. The idea is that you find another website to partner with and see if they’d like to run a joint competition. For this to work, you’ll probably have to put a lot of the hard work in such as researching, writing copy etc but this is a small price to pay if you can find a good partner to work with. The exposure brought from this could give you lots of links and potential business too.
Interview people in your niche
If you’re struggling to find time to write content or get links, this can be a great, low cost technique. The idea is that you just need to write a set of questions and you ask an expert in your niche to answer them. So they are doing most of the writing for you! In exchange, you are giving them exposure on your website and a bit of an ego stroke.
If you are lucky enough to interview someone well-known, they can also use their own network to help promote the interview and get some traffic to your website.
Turn video interviews into blog posts cheaply
If you are in a niche where other experts have been interviewed on video, you can turn these videos into written blog posts by transcribing the audio. You can do this yourself if you have absolutely no budget at all, or you can use a service such as Speechpad to transcribe for you. This can cost as little as $15 for a few hundred words of good content.
Make a weekly roundup blog post
This is another quick and easy way to get content on your blog, it can also help you build links and relationships in your niche. The idea is that you curate good quality blog posts from the week into a roundup blog post. You only need a handful of blog posts to make this work and you just need a few lines of text to explain each one.
You can take things a step further if you want and email the people you’ve featured to let them know that their content has made it into your roundup post.
Create XML sitemaps if you have a large website
Here is a quick technical tip that doesn’t take long to carry out and can help Google to index your website a bit better. What you do it use a free online sitemap generator to do this, or even download one to your machine. Google has curated a huge list of them which you can see here. Once you have your sitemap, you can upload it to your website and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools.
