Finding affordable SEO for your budget

If you’ve found your way to this page then like many others, you’re on the lookout for affordable SEO. Fortunately, you’re in luck! Many of the most prominent SEO techniques are cost-effective for the results they produce. In this post, we’ll be focusing on only the most cost-effective measures that you can take.

Unfortunately, there is no set rate that I can list here that will apply to all websites and all web developers. All costs should, however, be proportional to the size of the task (and the size of your website). All of the below are low priced relative to setting up a website.

Keywords
First of all, keyword research and implementation within your content is an extremely cost effective measure and is fundamental to proper website SEO. Keywords have been used since the dawn of the Internet, though the way we use them has changed.

Keywords work because search engines use robots, called crawlers, to scan through the content of each page of your website. These crawlers get an understanding of what your website is about by finding keywords on your page.

Responsive design
Next up, is responsive design. Responsive design is all about building a website that works on multiple platforms including mobile phones and tablet devices. If you’ve ever clicked onto a site while browsing on your mobile only to find that the site doesn’t work as it normally does, then you’ve seen what can happen when responsive design is missed. Plus, if you’re building your site from scratch, it will cost more or less the same to build your site to be responsive from the start.

Blog
Finally on our list of affordable website SEO practices, is blogging. Creating a blog on your site is cheap, and it can be added to and managed for as little as nothing if you’re happy to do it yourself.

Affordable SEO techniques are often the most effective

It is really quite shocking how many websites are only a small investment away from being a success. But which never make the leap. This is particularly true since building a website online is an investment, just like setting up any other type of business.

The way to think about SEO is that it plays a similar role to other investments which would be necessary for say a shop or a restaurant. You wouldn’t buy a retail premise and simply leave it as it is. Rather you would invest in transforming the place to make it your own. You would also need to invest in furniture, advertising, and a never ending list of other things in order succeed. This is the same for SEO, and in this post, we’ll be looking at some affordable SEO techniques, and why they are worthwhile.

Small business website design
The first element of SEO that I want to look at is website design, since it makes for a useful comparison. Designing an attractive and professional website is a hugely important element of success online, I’m sure you’ll agree. well, it can be compared to all aesthetic investments that might be needed for a shop or restaurant. Furniture, signage, window displays and so on are essential to a retail premise, just as design is for a website.

Responsive design
Responsive design pertains to designing the blueprints of your website so that it can function optimally. This includes devices like mobiles and tablets, as well as at home personal computers. The investment can include your website design, and this investment opens you up to around double the potential audience.

Keywords
Keywords are another extremely effective SEO technique. And it is affordable to all websites. Keywords work by helping you to better connect your content to your audience.

The best affordable SEO techniques

Though it’s true that many companies spend a small fortune on SEO campaigns, it’s definitely possible to implement really effective affordable SEO techniques, especially for smaller businesses. In fact many of the most crucial SEO techniques can be done simply.

In a few basic steps your website can go from being completely seo incompatible to relatively crisp, you just need to know what to prioritize.

First of focus on the way you’re going to be presenting your content, the structure of your site and your sitemap in other words. Is navigating your website easy? This will have a big effect on both web crawlers used by search engines as well as your audience and both will lead to a snowball effect rolling downhill for your page ranking.

Also the visual design. When it comes to ranking well on search engines like Google your popularity from your audience is important and this can be effected by the visual appearance of your site. Bold, loud, flashy websites may come across distasteful and too much info and media can cause overcrowding taking focus away for your content.

Also simple keyword search is valuable, particularly when done thoroughly. Try implementing your keyword process with your copy / content writing to safe time and effort. There are even free software available for finding and refining keywords for your given topic / industry.

Try connecting to a few similar level related websites through backlinks, this is beneficial for a few reasons. Firstly as mentioned earlier the more links to your pages, the easier it is to crawl for search engine bots. But also having valuable backlinks is a great long term way to expand your reach dramatically for pulling in traffic. Finally building relationships with other online businesses through this networking can have other great and unexpected results.

Affordable SEO for your business, large or small

I’m often asked how the biggest, most popular websites for each industry manage their SEO differently to smaller firms who make far smaller investments. The great thing is that while it’s true that big companies have significant marketing budgets to ensure their SEO success, the techniques used don’t actually differ much from any other technique.

The main difference with SEO for big multinationals is that firstly they know the value of SEO, and are sure to spend lots of time and resources to ensure their SEO is in constant development. The only other difference is that for those few big companies who sell their products in large part because of brand name, it’s easy for them to direct consumers in since no other company uses that brand name as an SEO keyword, and this helps to pull big numbers in.

While a small electrical wholesaler might focus more on relevant keywords for the products they sell, a company like Nike can also focus simply on attracting customers with the brand name. It’s true that this is a big advantage for these companies, but it isn’t how the majority of users search, and the most affordable SEO techniques when properly applied can still help your small business to compete with the big dogs.

Firstly take advantage of keywords particular to your business. If you specialise in baking bread then it’s unlikely you’re ever going to feature that highly for a search like ‘bread’. These searches are reserved for general searches about the product, and will display the few of the biggest names in the industry.

Instead focus on long-tail keywords that apply more to your business than even the biggest names. This may look something like ‘traditional hand baked bread’ or ‘artisan bread in Central LA’. This way you serve your content (any maybe your bread) directly to those users most likely to make a purchase.

There are plenty of other ways to utilise affordable SEO techniques to get the better of your competition, but the best way to see what’s on offer is by viewing the services offered by the professionals. (Link to services)

Affordable SEO, Cash Flow, Capital, and RoI

Let’s start out with a simple, hopefully inarguable premise: SEO is a marketing expense. If your business isn’t treating SEO like a marketing expense, you will have to get very lucky to stumble upon a system that makes it affordable. SEO has a single purpose: to bring customers to your web presence (where, if your site is doing its part, they will end up buying, signing up, donating, or doing whatever you want them to do.)

Marketing And Money

As with any other marketing expense, when your business spends money on SEO, it expects to get more money in return than it spent. If there’s no RoI, there’s been a marketing failure: either the SEO didn’t produce that anticipated number of visitors, or your website didn’t convert enough of those visitors (or your price point was set too low.)

Also identically to any other marketing venture, even the most talented experts can only estimate what your RoI might be at the beginning of an SEO campaign. That’s because marketing is inherently competitive: people only have so much brainspace, and if one of your competitors manages to outmaneuver you and get in there first (or more ‘stickily’), you can be assured that your marketing campaign won’t do as well as you would have in a vacuum. Similarly, if a competing site manages to nail that #1 spot for your choice keyword, it can take months beyond the anticipated timeline to dethrone them, especially if they’re conscientious.

So How Do You Recognize Affordable SEO When You See It?

Here’s the real rub: the word ‘affordable’ is a very tricky one, because different businesses have different resources. If your business is a high-cash-flow business, that moves money in and out constantly but never has a large buildup, you might not be able to afford a massive effort that establishes a long-term web presence. If your business is a high-capital business, that isn’t moving a lot of money right now but has a solid startup fund, you might not be able to afford the continuous mid-sized flow of money that it can take to climb up to the top of the SERPs over 6-18 months.

Both of those circumstances can still result in great SEO — by which we mean “they can produce a great RoI” — but not all SEO companies can handle both situations. So you might be theoretically able to get affordable SEO, and simply not have a company near you that offers the kind of SEO your business would find affordable.

Fortunately, this being the Internet, you can always search for SEO companies a city over or a few states away. There’s no reason you should ever be entirely without an affordable SEO option that will bring in the RoI you need.

Affordable SEO Is Not Hard To Find

The article below will cover the basics on finding an affordable SEO service that suits your every need. Generally people tend to think SEO is expensive and unnecessary, but this is not really the case. Finding a company that is specialized in the matter is key for a successful development but it is very important that you cover the steps below in order to put your money and your site into the right hands.

SEO is Costly: Truth or Myth?

The real lie would be to say that SEO is unnecessary, and once you understand this as a starting point for development we can guarantee SEO is not costly at all but really the other way around: it would be costly not to invest in SEO.

What to Ask From Your Supplier

Every project and every site is different from each other, and requires different and special attention; so before you sign up at any supplier make sure that they will go a long way in order to achieve what they promise. Sometimes this will mean that they optimize your site, but some other times it will also require article submissions or presence on social websites and this is not a fact to undermine.

Working with Us

Working with any SEO supplier will mean developing a relationship between the two companies, and this is because the internet is organic and changes every day, but also because your site needs to be updated and every update must contemplate SEO strategies for it to be relevant online. We understand what you need, and are in the business for the long haul  that’s why with us you can get complete affordable SEO coverage without having to pay any extra money.

There are many companies which don’t take interest in the clients they serve besides charging a monthly fee. But that is not us: We understand our clients and know how important their business is to them so we take the time and dedication to guarantee your site’s success in developing the proper, affordable, online presence.

Effectiveness of Affordable SEO Services

Regardless of the size of your online business, if you to carry out some SEO on your website, it is very likely you understand the benefits of hiring the services of an expert service. Small businesses or those that have just begun may be looking to hire an affordable SEO service due to their budget or personal preference. The misconception of affordable SEO services being less quality is what stops many from obtaining this help when in fact they can be just as professional and effective as SEO that has been obtained from a costly company.

Understand the Service

Before moving any further, it is important you have the correct understanding of the correct SEO service for your business, over the price. You need to know exactly what you want, as this will be of big help when it comes to the selecting process. You can simply make a list of everything you want and compare your list to the one provided by the service provider. Generally, these services usually come in packages, which vary from being small and basic to large and specialized. If the basic package includes everything you need, you can save yourself both time and money and get started from here.

Search and Pick

Obviously, like all other things you will have to take out some time in order to search and understand all affordable SEO companies. Some may offer just a few features whereas others may have more. However, this depends on what you are after. If you take the time, there is no reason to why you cannot find a SEO service that is both affordable and effective. Market competition also needs to be considered, so be sure to think about this when selecting a company.

Community Spaces and Forums

If you are having a tough time finding a service, you can always post your requirements on good SEO community spaces and forums. The majority of SEO businesses check these spaces frequently, which may bring you to a good deal. Before you finalize the deal, it is important to read some reviews from the firm or ask them for any references or samples from previous jobs. Only hire if you are satisfied.

How to Find Affordable SEO Services

Due to the expansion of online marketing, finding a good and affordable SEO service for internet marketing is a tough competition. With hundreds, even thousands of companies telling you they can get your website ranking amongst the top, it is a difficult decision when choosing the best service. Listed below are a few tips and tricks, which will help you get the SEO on you website done with the best and affordable SEO Company.

Hire a Small Company
A huge SEO company will have a high price, which makes it expensive. Companies that are well-known and experienced may also demand a high price. When it comes to finding an affordable SEO service, it is usually small companies that fit this criterion. Before hiring, you need to ensure they know what they are doing and are experienced.

Trust Search Engine Results
It is a good option to use the internet to search for a SEO Company. You may not find the company on the first page, but if you keep going you will definitely find one that will give you amazing results.

Requesting a Lower Price
You can obtain SEO service at an affordable price, but only if you know exactly how. The majority of SEO services do quote high rates, which is why you need to bargain so you can pay reasonable rates and get the best service.

Your Help Helps
It depends on the amount of work that needs to be done on your website when it comes to the company’s rates and quotes. If you also lend a hand in the process, this will reduce those rates. Just because you hire an SEO service that doesn’t mean they have to do everything for you. If there is something you can do on your site, then by all means you should do that and then hire an expert for the tasks you find difficult. Doing these costs less as you are only paying for what is being done and not what has already been done.

Finding an SEO Company is not hard work as there are loads out there. However, finding one that is good and affordable is usually the tricky part. Follow the tips above and you won’t have to go through this problem next time you are on the search!

Selecting Affordable SEO Packages

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO is an important factor for website content and blog promotion. Many people who own websites and blogs prefer to take care of the SEO themselves, due to the cost of getting it done by a professional. However, affordable SEO packages are available and are easy to obtain if you know how.

When it comes to SEO, the quality is surely favored over price. This is because once a site has proper SEO that surely predicts whether it will rank high or low amongst other sites. When we are talking about affordable SEO packages, it does not necessarily mean it is low in quality just because of the cost, as some people don’t demand as much due to the large number of SEOs analysts out there.

How Does SEO Benefit Your Business?
SEO does a lot for your site/blog/business, it’s basically a make or break situation. Due to SEO, keyword optimization is formed and the traffic to your site increases. If the keywords rank well, your site will also appear in the top sites amongst search engines. You can always perform the SEO for your site yourself or ask a SEO professional to do it. The benefit of asking a SEO specialist is that they tend to be familiar with several tricks and techniques that can help increase page rankings immediately.

How to Choose the Best and Affordable SEO Package
Many professional Search Engine Optimization companies offer many services to different businesses. However, when it comes to choosing the right package, then this is vital as the last thing you want to do is pay for SEO, which in the end turns out to have missed some key features. Just to help you, I have listed several pointers below, which will always make you one step closer to obtaining the perfect SEO package.
– Set down your goals and look for a SEO package with the necessary features.
– Stay aware of scammers.
– Read a brief on the whole SEO subject. This way you will know what you are looking for.
– Ask for samples and the success ratio as it will give you a good idea of what to expect.
– How much are you willing to pay for SEO? The pricing depends on the services and features, so be sure to search thoroughly so you don’t spend over your intended budget.
Good luck with expanding your business!

Affordable SEO Service Providers and Their Rewarding Services

Search optimization strategies can greatly help improve business’s search engine rankings on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Along with higher rankings on search engines, comes a higher traffic flow and more customers. Today, every website representing an organization is maintained with SEO services. These services need to be researched in order to find the best fit for your needs and to ensure that you are using an affordable SEO provider who will work diligently on improving your site and business.

• SEO Strategies and Services: In order to increase search engine rankings and traffic flow, SEO companies use strategies such as tactical keyword placement and organization of landing pages. When SEO strategies are implemented specific keywords are chosen to target a precise audience. This not only increases traffic flow through the site, but also helps in lead generation.
• Choosing a company: It is important to research SEO providers and find one whom meets your needs and provides affordable SEO services. It is also very important to find a provider whom has a strong track record and is trusted and credible to provide long-lasting results. All providers that are researched should be compared to fully understand their different strategies and techniques and to get a look at affordability.
• Consumers: Visitors to your site will always be welcome, however, subscribers and returning customers are the ones who are truly cherished and appreciated. With a strong, user friendly website, customers are far more likely to return consistently. Search engine optimization providers work to ensure that consumers find landing pages useful. This encourages visitors to explore the site more and often become a customer.
• Analysis: After choosing an affordable, reliable, SEO provider a large team will be put together to begin analyzing your site. This team is made up web page designers, content writers, and link builders. The team applies the strategies set in place by working with social media marketing consultants in order to market throughout popular social websites. The team also uses keyword placement throughout the site and ensures that it is user friendly and accommodating.

What You Should Look For In an Affordable SEO Company

When you are selecting an affordable SEO company then there are some things that you need to look for so that you get the most for what you pay for. A company that has a competitive price should also be able to properly document the websites SEO and how everything they are doing is working.

SEO Statistics
The main area that SEO can be measured by is by using statistics. When you have baseline information and start to introduce changes designed to make your site more visible you can track how the changes are reflected on the visitors to your site. You can also track the sales back you are converting from the search engines and pay per click adds that you might be using. This lets you both know that a campaign is working and to put a dollar value on acquisition costs for each sale made.

SEO Reports
Many affordable SEO companies will put together an SEO report that will check through all parts of your website including:

• HTML code problems
• Meta tag problems
• Incompatible areas not checked by search engine crawlers
• Current ranking for the site and pages and how to improve them
• An overall plan to increase website ranking and visibility to the target audience

This clearly shows areas that need work and how the company will improve them. Each website is different and each solution needs to take into account the good and bad areas. One website might benefit from adding content via a blog and introducing a social media presence other websites require extensive coding changes to make good content properly accessible. Identifying individual problems and building tailored solution is the key to spend money on SEO wisely.

SEO Techniques
One of the ways that an affordable SEO company can improve your website but keep costs down is to reuse and improve existing content. Ensuring all links are working correctly and visible to search engines is a low cost and effective technique. Checking back links can weed out bad or non performing links that may be bring down page ranking. The final area is keyword density in content it is very simple to modify existing content to have proper keyword density. In many cases it is not the case that keywords are not abundant enough but they are over used and by editing them SEO are improved.

The Best Options to Get Affordable SEO Services

The internet is becoming more important every day and every business no matter their size needs a source of affordable SEO so that they are visible when a potential customer is searching. Here are some options to look at for SEO services.

Contract a SEO Company
The large SEO companies can be expensive but there are leaner less expensive companies that can offer affordable SEO service. Research is important and any feedback that you can find on the internet can help you decide if the company is right for you.

Employ A SEO Expert
Training an existing employee or hiring and employee to take over your SEO needs can work well even in a small business. It is unlikely that SEO will be a full time job for a small business so you can split their time between other appropriate tasks.

Outsource Your SEO Needs
Outsourcing is a growing area and there are many freelancers offering SEO services. This can be an affordable option because of the ability to access trained professionals from anywhere in the world. It is important to carefully check freelancers and previous work and structure their payment in terms of clearly defined goals.

Do Not Be Afraid To Negotiate
There is competition within the SEO industry so it is important that you understand what they are charging for and negotiate over pricing. As always the more you are spending the greater the incentive for the representative to negotiate on price.

Look For Discounts
There are many SEO companies that offer discount to attract customers. This can be a good opportunity and you should always consider offers or packages that represent good value. It is important to understand what they are offering and any exclusions so that when you are comparing quotations you are comparing like for like.

As you can see there are many options for affordable SEO services. Spending a few dollars more or less is much less important than obtaining the increased traffic and sales opportunity benefits of having a properly optimized website. So what are you waiting for! You should start the process today!

Using Affordable SEO Can Save Your Business

When it comes to running a small business, using affordable SEO may be one of the best choices you can make. Marketing campaigns and PPC management can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars per month. With a business, every dollar matters. If you have a website for your business or run an online business, then you know that the more visitors you get   the more sales you will have. Search engine optimization is the most cost effective way to increase the amount of traffic your website receives. While there are free methods of organic SEO that you can implement yourself, hiring an affordable SEO service can help ensure that your website begins getting more visitors. Before you hire an affordable SEO service, you should understand a little bit about search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization is used in two different ways. There is on page SEO and there is off page SEO. On page SEO is any type of organic SEO that is applied directly to your web pages, such as proper usage of Meta titles and placement of keywords inside the content. Off page SEO refers to methods of marketing your website externally. This would include quality backlinks from other websites.

Content is a major aspect of organic SEO. Having a custom blog creation that you can post articles to regularly can increase the amount of useful content your website has. If you are looking for an affordable SEO service, then consider hiring a less established company. They will probably have lower rates than more experienced companies. Use them for article writing and distribution, posting these articles to your blog to create additional content.

For an in depth SEO plan, then an experienced SEO company may have the edge. Blog posting and forum posting, along with other off page SEO practices, performed by these experts can go a long way to increasing the number of visitors your website receives. Whether you go with professional SEO services or affordable SEO services, organic SEO will increase traffic to your website without breaking your bank.

Can A Video Be Powerful Organic SEO Even If It Doesn’t Go Viral?

Naturally there’s nothing better than ca viral video if you are trying to improve the health of a site. With an appropriately placed backlink, or a good enough call to action along with a video that goes absolutely crazy, it’s almost a licence to print money at times. You can literally attract tens of thousands of new visitors to your site when a video truly goes viral. What happens when that doesn’t quite happen?

Firstly, the moment that you place a video on the net, it is already well placed to do better than most content, whether it goes viral or not. It’s a simple fact that people would rather watch a video to gather information than read a page of text. For a start, it’s more engaging, and secondly, it’s easier to do.

It’s also a fact that search engines like Google love videos. A web page which has a video attached is actually around fifty times more likely to end up on the first page of Google’s page results, which is pretty incredible when you think about it. So as you can see, it’s not only the case that a video can be a powerful SEO tool even when it doesn’t go viral  it is actually something that is almost essential whether it goes viral or not.

The question is, what do you do about it? There are actually loads of companies out there who can offer video marketing services, and this is very affordable SEO. A little video goes a long way in the SEO stakes, so it’s well worth doing. You will find that a lot of professional companies offer video marketing services as part of an overall organic SEO service. As we all know, an organic approach to SEO is crucial in this day and age of transparency and high tech algorhythms, so employing the right sort of company is critical to your future success. Bad SEO is bad for your site, so make sure you find a company who is going to have the right sort of approach.

Mobile Website Design Doesn’t Preclude Interactive Videos It Loves Them

Mobile sites are big business right now. There’s no doubt that the next twelve months are going to result in a huge amount of people using their mobile devices for search. It’s happening right now and it’s growing at an exponential rate. The way things are going; there will be more online activity through mobile devices than through anything else. What does this mean to you as a website owner? It means you have to look carefully at your mobile optimization of course!

It’s fairly common knowledge that one of the key methods of making your website mobile friendly is by ensuring that the mobile version of your site is low bandwidth. This makes it easier for people to view the site without having to put up with slow connections and poor displays. Having said this, there are some exceptions to this rule. The first is including video on your site.

Having an explanatory video on your site helps you in so many ways. Firstly, in a very true sense, it is more user friendly. Forget about bandwidth and keeping the search engines happy for a second  users like video. If you can keep your market happy, why wouldn’t you do that? Browsers are more inclined to find out about you through a video presentation than through a load of text, so give them what they want!

Beyond this very valid point, we can also mention Google’s preferences. They love to see a video on your home page  because they know it means you are delivering something your followers and potential customers want. So there is bound to be an increase in bandwidth with the inclusion of a video, but guess what? The pro outweighs the con. It’s a judgement call, and you should be falling on the side of video! That’s especially the case when it is such an affordable SEO technique. The cost is negligible against the benefits it can bring.

All you have to do is to go out and find a small business SEO company who can deal with a little video marketing for you. It will make the user experience on your site so much better, will help with your search engine page results and it won’t break the bank either! What have you got to lose?

4 Reasons Video Marketing Is The New Affordable SEO

There’s no doubt that people who are taking an organic approach to SEO are trying to find new ways to add value to the service that they offer. The market never gets any less competitive, and with more and more large companies throwing huge amounts of money at SEO, it’s important to be able to find ways to optimize which don’t always cost the client huge sums of money. Video Marketing is certainly one of the best ways to achieve this. Organic SEO companies are really using video marketing very heavily at the moment, purely because it is an affordable method of SEO, and here’s why that’s the case:

• Better conversions. At the moment, having a video on your web page makes a browser 6 times more likely to convert to being a customer. This is just simple mathematics! Statistics also tell us that while only 20% of web users read all of the text on a page, but 80% will watch the same information being relayed to them through the miracle that is video!
• Longer website visits. A user who views a video on a page is likely to stay there for two minutes longer than other users!
• Video emails are more thoroughly read. If you are trying to persuade users, then sending an email with a video will help. Most marketing emails are read by around 20% of recipients, but if there’s a video included, it’s more like 75%.
• If a picture paints a thousand words, then a video shoots the whole story. Put simply, video really does tell the whole story. For the sake of the space of a short article, you could have a whole video, which can be as expansive as you could ever wish for.

If you’re looking Affordable SEO then video marketing is the way to do it. It doesn’t cost the earth, and it is so effective given the cheap costs involved. It’s always a good idea to get the professionals involved though, or you could end up with something that is rather amateurish looking!

Social Media Takes Too Much Time…Unless An Affordable SEO Company Does It For You

There’s a lot of yakking going on across the Internet Marketing world about the power of social media. Creating powerful, viral-enabled content and getting it out in front of the crowd is the new “backlink building”. Unfortunately, taking the time to fully engage the social media world is a massive time sink, and if you’re not ready with a deep and detailed plan for exactly how you’re going to orchestrate your social campaign — including how you’re going to respond if (when) things go pear-shaped, you’re going to be caught off guard and have to spend even more time fixing it all.

That’s why, for the 90% of businesses that don’t have Ford’s entire office building devoted to Tweeting about the latest Fiesta, it makes a lot more sense to handle the social media the same way you handle your front doormats: outsource it to an affordable SEO company. Those guys who replace your front doormat once a week are experts who specialize in a very small area of endeavor: cleaning and moving around those little mats. Likewise, any decent local Internet Marketing company will have social media specialists on hand who manipulate pins and likes the same way the carpet guy manipulates warps and woofs.

They’ll sit down with you and work out some goals and some tools that you feel comfortable with them using. They’ll want to know things like what you expect from your social media — are you “just” looking to secure a few more first page placements, or are you more focused on building a crowd slavering to buy your next product? Do you want to use the social media to create backlinks? Or do you want to switch it around and use backlink building to develop the size of your social crowd?

Once they know what your goals are and they have an understanding of what lines not to cross, they’ll sit down and get to work. Social media is inherently unpredictable, because you’re dealing with people and not bits and bytes, but it’s also easy to manipulate — so success is more a matter of time than a question of success.

Affordable SEO is an Infinite Game

There are two kinds of games: finite games, that have a defined endpoint and usually a winner, and infinite games, which don’t. Both kinds of games have rules, moves, and goals, but infinite games’ goals move as the player moves. (Getting rich is an infinite game, too, as anyone who has ever reached their financial ‘goals’ can attest.) Either kind of game can be quit, but only infinite games can be voluntarily played for your entire life (some games of Monopoly notwithstanding.)

What the heck does all of this have to do with SEO? Simple: if you’re looking for affordable SEO, you’d better be prepared for an infinite game.

The rules of affordable SEO are as follows:

• * Get your website ranked more and more highly for more and more keywords.
• * Don’t spend too much money while doing so.

You can see from the rules themselves that there is no “winning” in SEO. There is only accumulating more and more keywords in your “First place ranking” pool. There is also an ever-changing goalpost in the second rule as well: “too much” is an entirely relative term. Too much may be a specific amount, like $50/month, or you can define it as a percentage of your income, but no matter how you define it, your definition will almost certainly change over a long enough period of time.

When you ‘play the game’ of SEO, your ‘playing piece’ is your website. SEO choices define the ‘moves’ you make with your piece. Your goal is to make sure that your ‘moves’ take you higher up the ranks than your competitor’s do. There’s a terrible amount of different SEO tactics that you can take, and they don’t all work equally well (or even work the same way for each industry), which makes research and information gathering vital to long-term SEO success.

That’s where SEO companies — and the notion of ‘affordable’ SEO — come into the equation. To play the game of SEO on the level of the big boys, you can’t do it yourself; you need help. Getting the smartest players that your money can buy to join your team, well, that’s the move you need to make first.

Who Has Time for Organic SEO, Much Less Social Marketing? (We Do!)

Organic SEO is probably the single most important part of any commercial enterprise online. If you can’t rank for searches on the search engines, you’re entire business is going to depend on traffic that either costs unnecessary money or isn’t reliable in the long term — neither of which makes for good business. The problem with organic SEO — and doubly so if you tack on it’s ‘evil twin’, social marketing, is that it takes hundreds of hours every week.

If you’re a huge corporation and you can afford to buy an SEO company and make it your in-house Internet Division, more power to you — but if you’re part of the 99% of businesses that are operating on a minimum of manpower and man-hours, you’ve got a tough dilemma in front of you. You can either hire a couple of people to do full-time SEO and hope they can handle it all, or you can spend a little more money and hire a contractor to do your SEO for you.

The Power of Outsourcing
The problem with hiring someone in-house to do your SEO is twofold: first, and this is true no matter what any guru tells you, SEO is complex enough that no two people in the entire world have, between the two of them, mastered the discipline. Second, doing SEO work for a single business, even if two people could do it together, is really amazingly mind-numblingly boring.

That’s because, once the initial “fun” work of designing webpages, planning a content strategy, and researching your competitors’ SEO tactics for nuggets of brilliance is over, the job is all about building backlinks. Over and over and over. Day after day after day. SEO companies can handle this because they’re constantly getting new clients, so at least a couple of times a week, you can expect to do some of the fun, fulfilling stuff — not so if you’re just working for the same company endlessly, building. yet. another. backlink.

So when you start looking at which makes for more affordable SEO, consider the human cost — and hire an SEO company.

Affordable SEO Means Settling In For The Long Haul

Affordable SEO is at the top of every webmaster’s “to get” list. But the SEO industry isn’t like most others — having your website optimized for certain keywords such that they show up first or second when people search for those keywords on Google isn’t like buying a hamburger, or even like having your bathroom renovated. It’s more akin to, of all things, getting an annuity.

Annuities, if you’re not familiar, are interesting financial instruments. You pay in every month for a long time, and then suddenly they ‘mature’. Once they mature, rather than you paying in, they pay out — every month for the rest of your life. SEO operates similarly.

Every month, you pay an SEO company to build backlinks for you, and to optimize your existing online content for the search engines. As time passes, the stack of backlinks pointing toward your website grows, and your website creeps slowly up the search engine results pages for the keywords you’re targeting.

Then one day, you reach a point — usually, it’s the first page of a highly-competitive keyword, or the top three slots of a less-competitive keyword — and suddenly the payout comes. Visitors start trickling in, and you start making sales solely from the organic traffic you get from Google.

The difference between an annuity and your website’s SEO is twofold. First, you don’t ever stop paying into SEO — but on the flipside, the benefits from SEO continue to grow for as long as you pay in (unlike an annuity, which pays out a fixed amount each month forever.)

Every month you continue to pay into your SEO ‘fund’, the backlinks keep coming, and your website scores a higher rank for the keywords you’re targeting. If you achieve an optimal rank in one set of keywords, it’s easy to swap some out and start building toward more of them. The price never goes down, but the benefits keep going up with each passing month.

What that means, to bring things back around, is that the longer you spend paying for SEO, the more affordable — and more effective — it becomes. You can search for the best deal per backlink or whatever other criteria you choose, but in the end, there’s no such thing as affordable SEO at the beginning — and at the end, the only SEO that isn’t affordable is the SEO you stop paying for too soon.