Dont Be A Cheapskate In SEO - Work Smarter, Not Harder
By: Brian Petersen
Tags: Seo Tools, Content Writing Tips, Content Creation, Startup, SEO

Photo by Kerry Rawlinson on Unsplash

I am a member of various Facebook groups and a few forums as well, and I don’t mind sharing advice with newbies that are starting doing SEO.

Many people are eager to learn, but many people also seem to expect miracles to happen overnight, being on a shoestring budget.

It is not that I think you have an advantage if you suffer from shiny object syndrome, but a few smart investments can save you a lot of time — and trouble!.

SEO does not need to be expensive

Photo by Tamanna Rumee on Unsplash

I understand that if you are trying to start a business online, you might be on a tight budget — but being a cheapskate can harm your business.

Compared to a brick and mortar business, it is incredibly cheap to start an online business.

If your goal is to make affiliate income, you can even start with a completely free blog on WordPress, Blogger, or Tumblr.

The downside with those free blogging platforms is that it makes it harder for you to establish a brand.

If you plan to build a brand and stay in business, you need your domain name and a hosting account.

It is a small investment, but don’t go for the cheapest shared hosting you can find.

Speed is crucial, and in 2021 load speed will have an even more significant impact on SEO and your organic rankings.

Many people are looking for free tools when doing SEO, but you need insights you can rely on, especially in your strategy’s keyword research part.

The right strategy needs to be paired with the right tools.

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Just because a keyword has a high volume is not the same that it has low competition.

It would be best if you examined your competitors' strengths so that you can pick the right battles.

You need to evaluate their domain’s strength, what kind of backlinks they got, and how they have crafted their content.

Even SEO might seem like a “Do it yourself” business, you still need a solid toolbox.

The toolbox should provide you with the insights you need to structure and execute your strategy.

If you started as a carpenter, you would probably aim a bit higher than just borrowing a rusty saw and a hammer from your neighbor.

Think about it, why use a lot of effort trying to rank for a super competitive keyword simply because you didn’t have the proper insights?

Cutting corners can lead to massive failure.

Producing quality content is a time-consuming task, and often content creation is one of those tasks where website owners are willing to cut corners.

It might be tempting to splash 5–10$ and have someone craft a short article that is “SEO optimized” for your target keyword.

Don´t fall into that trap! If an article is targeting the main keyword and the author has remembered to use your keyword in:

The article title

Meta description

H1

Springed a few times around the article

Added a few synonyms

That does not mean that your article is properly SEO optimized! You need to examine the content of your competitors and do it better than they do.

Look over the shoulders of your competitors.

If you want to do it better than your competitors, you need to create better content.

Have a look at the top 10 positions on page one in Google, examine what your competitors are doing.

You need to:

Examine how many words (on average) your competitors on page one in Google use

It would be best if you examined how they use title, H1 and H2´s

Are they using any bullet points?

What kind of questions do they answer?

Granted, if you have to manually go through each of the URL´s ranking on page one in Google and examine each result in the SERP word by word, it would be a time-consuming task.

Work smarter — Not harder.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Content creation is the kind of tedious work that can be done a lot smarter by using the right tool.

Remember that the most valuable asset you have is your time — no matter what you do, it is impossible to replace the time you have already wasted.

There is no reason to sit manually and figure out how your competitors have structured their content.

What if it would be possible to use software that would be able to tell you exactly how you need to structure your content to beat your competitors?

How to create the best possible SEO content

The thing is that creating a content brief for either yourself or an external copywriter. It does not need to take hours or days.

Imagine if you could get an overlook showing you exactly what topics you need to cover, what kind of words you should use, how you should use H1-H6 — and even how many words there needs to be in your article.

The software would even bring in relevant questions to answer or statistical data to establish your article’s credibility.

If you are curious about the entire setup I use, I have made a blog post about the strategy and the tool I use to create SEO articles.

If you want to dig a bit deeper, please read my blog post: The pain of creating content optimized for SEO