Best way to spend small SEO budget?

12 years ago

Originally Posted by acv987

I work for a small business that has been around for 35 years. The website has been around for 7-10 years but was poorly done and SEO was not a priority at all. I have been creating new original content and posting it regularly. I am considering asking for a small $500-1000 seo budget. How would it be best spent? My first thought was getting us listed in these paid directories like yahoo and localeze. What do you think?

You will get a lot of off target answers in this thread. At least 90% of the people here are either doing SEO for their own site that is not a real offline business or have no experience doing SEO for businesses and think its the same as doing SEO for an affiliate or adsense income site. The truth is it depends on your industry. For example if you are in the travel industry you would be better off getting listed in travel related directories in regional directories. If you are in tech industry and come out with new products you would do better with getting covered by Tech blogs.

As for getting listed in paid directories - some ARE nice to have but if your total budget is $500 and thats all then you might as well skip them because you are not going to rank just based on being in those directories.

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ilee

12 years ago

Mike's bang on the money. I had the biggest shock when I took on a client (with a very small budget) thinking it would be similar to SEO for other sites.

I was working with an exciting financial services company that had just released several innovative products. From that we were able to release some press releases to the journalists in the field. Try finding journalists that have written related articles and ask them whether they'll be interested in writing a featured article about the business, or a follow up one of the previous article. If you give them all the information they need, a small proportion would say yes.

Because a lot of blogs require money for commercial guest posts and not personal ones, I built an array of personal sites with quality content about different aspects of the niche and pointed them at the main site (through banners).

Ian

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MikeFriedman

12 years ago

It also makes a difference if your target market is local, national, or global.

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acv987

12 years ago

We are a janitorial chemical and equipment supplier. The company does pretty well but is just lacking in the internet department. My previous SEO experience was with autoblogs and the like so doing this for a real business is new to me. I will investigate getting a news article written about us. We are carrying a few Made in the USA machines now, so maybe that could be a good topic.

Thanks

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creaturelocaljohn

12 years ago

You can do directory submission, you don't have to use those paid directories there are lots of directories which are free to use like yelp, superpages, google+local, yahoo and bing local.

If you want to focus on writing some article you need to do keyword research and see whats the hot keywords for your niche, then write article based on on the keywords.

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johnpaulgrant

12 years ago

Hey,

You do not have to use paid directories. There are a lot of free ones. And also, since you've been making original content, you might as well start guest blogging. Guest blogging is an effective method.

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Becker13

Banned 12 years ago

Originally Posted by acv987

I work for a small business that has been around for 35 years. The website has been around for 7-10 years but was poorly done and SEO was not a priority at all. I have been creating new original content and posting it regularly. I am considering asking for a small $500-1000 seo budget. How would it be best spent? My first thought was getting us listed in these paid directories like yahoo and localeze. What do you think?

Ive always prefered creating niche related sites (that have PR) then pointing them back at the niche site. Has ranked myself and clients for some large keywords.

Best of luck

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nik0

Banned 12 years ago

Travel niche is not that easy to rank, I know someone who gets most of his traffic from forums instead so better use the money on forum marketing or in other words hire someone to post at relevant forums. Optionally you can also build your own network.

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gearmonkey

12 years ago

Originally Posted by acv987

I work for a small business that has been around for 35 years. The website has been around for 7-10 years but was poorly done and SEO was not a priority at all. I have been creating new original content and posting it regularly. I am considering asking for a small $500-1000 seo budget. How would it be best spent? My first thought was getting us listed in these paid directories like yahoo and localeze. What do you think?

Have you considered building a strategy then outsourcing using $5 services like Fiverr or odesk?

You can save a small fortune if you take some time building a plan yourself.

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GodMode52

12 years ago

Originally Posted by gearmonkey

Have you considered building a strategy then outsourcing using $5 services like Fiverr or odesk?

You can save a small fortune if you take some time building a plan yourself.

Dude he's runing a serious offline business , what should he buy on fiverr? Backlinks from fake PR sites with 300 OBL on home page? 40000 blog comments? Please.

Use your money and rent or buy some real contextual links from your niche from real sites , get some serious press releases distribution , fix your on-site SEO and put some efforts in resarching , it may be easier than you think.

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acv987

12 years ago

What i have been doing the past few weeks is writing articles, posting them on the site, then analyzing the link for the competitors with the same keywords. Trying to get some of thier links now. The free ones at least. I guess my general plan is to keep writing and posting, getting submitted to directories, and copying backlinks. The thing that worries me about fiverr gigs, is the ones i have ordered in the past for my own sites were really spammy. While I am fine with that for personal blogs I really dont want to do that with a business site like this.

Thanks

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Chris Cartmill

Banned 12 years ago

[DELETED]

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acv987

12 years ago

Originally Posted by TopSpotMeChris

"We are a janitorial chemical and equipment supplier."
This means that it is a physical business and it's a local business.

On a limited budget I would:

Optimize the current website for local - free
Add author=rel tag to site for authorship - free
Build and optimize the Google Local Business Page - Free
Optimize Map Maker - Free
Submit to top 10 citation directories - Free
Submit press release to Online PR News - Free
Tie everything into social media and you should have a great start.

Thanks so much for your help everyone. I am going to implement these things right away.
The question I have is what do you mean by citation directories? Are these the same as dmoz and the like?

Thanks

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creaturelocaljohn

12 years ago

For link building service you can hire someone like from odesk, I know manual link building is a pain in the ass, coz it takes a long hours to submit your business in different directories in the internet.

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bsbear

12 years ago

Corporate/off-line SEO is a very different game than your usual online SEO.

Basically there is an authority and trust factor that comes into the game. Just make sure that you find someone who knows what they are doing in the online sector as well as the offline, if that makes sense.

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