Many people have wrong understanding that SEO is free, which is not true. SEO requires a lot of time, efforts and resources. In fact it take months of efforts to make your website rank better on SERP and for the overall success of the website. Oh yes my dear friends! All these will involve professional workers and will not come for free, it will cost you. We will discuss this topic in more detail to get insights about how SEO is not free traffic.
SEO has been a well-known technique for online marketing and being an SEO Outsourcing company, it is very imperative for me to make you aware of the fact that “SEO is not free”. I’m not talking about the cost that you pay for engaging an SEO agency but even if you are practicing in-house SEO, it is not free. You’ll require an IT team, SEO specialist, Web designer, Content writer etc. So, let’s find the real cost of SEO.
Keyword Research: This is the most important and initial step any SEO expert takes to accomplish his/her SEO objective. While doing keyword research, you’ll have to give numerous hours to find the actual search terms that web users enters on search engines. Apart from this you’ll also spend numerous hours tracking your website’s ranking and creating unique contents for your website. Still, no surety if it will help your ranking on SERP or not. For keyword research, you can refer our amazing article “A Guide to Keyword Research ”.
Competitive Research: Competitive research is also one of the primary step that needs to be done before starting your SEO. It includes keyword research, customer research, trade research etc. This helps you to understand what your product/services are, how and where you should promote them in online market. It is important to analyze your competitor’s site to know for what keywords they are ranking. Competitive research gives SEO insights to take better decisions for your business. But then, it also requires a professional search specialist because a good competitor analysis can only help you put your seo efforts in right direction.
Site Audit: It is very important to optimize your website, for which you need to perform a complete site audit. Doesn’t matter if your website is new or old, you must do periodic site audit. It will help you find the issues in your website and then you can fix it up. There are various things you need to analyze while performing site audit like Site speed, Keywords, KPI, Page URL names, Architecture and Site structure etc. To understand complete site audit you can refer our blog “How to Perform the Ultimate SEO Audit”.
On-Page Optimization: This includes website content, URL structure, website's titles and meta tags that must be properly determined. Your content should be unique and relevant to visitors search, then only it will help your search engine rankings. Also the sitemaps should be updated periodically, so that search engines spider could easily crawl and index your website. For on-page optimization, one must know the tips & tricks to use meta tags. You can refer to these blogs “Learn How to Create Meta Tags for Your Website” and "Ultimate Guide to On Page and Off Page SEO".
Off-Page Optimization: This includes Link building for your website, Blogging, Search Engine Submission, Directory Submission, Social Bookmarking etc. – which requires considerable efforts and intensive time. You can also refer this amazing article “21 Off-Page SEO Strategies to Build Your Online Reputation”.
Link Building: Link building means giving links to quality websites, authority websites and related websites. It will help you make your website more visible to users on search engines as well as gain more traffic from other websites linked to you. Furthermore, your web pages will be indexed faster and will be considered as a valuable resource. But, you must take care of the broken links because it can badly harm all your SEO efforts. Refer our article “Ultimate Guide to Broken Links”.
Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking will increase popularity of your links on web. Adding your site to high page rank bookmarking sites may help you gain traffic but only if your content is awesome. Yet again, it is time taking exercise and no surety if you’ll get the desired outcomes. However, SEO experts include social bookmarking in the best practices of seo.
Social Media Marketing: This may prove beneficial to your SEO efforts. If you spend time and execute it in a right way, social media marketing can effectively boost your seo to gain huge traffic and customers for your website. Here is an informative article on “Benefits of Social Media for Your Business".
Keep yourself updated on Google changes: It is crucial to follow Google rules and updates. Else your website may get penalized by Google. Following these rules and keeping yourself update does not takes much time, just little extra work. Moreover, this helps you make your site better than your competitor’s site on SERP. Here is an amazing article which will help you understand “Why Your Website Deserves to Be Penalized By Google”.
Final words
Now, there is no dispute that SEO is not free traffic. You must have understood, it is a dedicated online activity that requires a lot of best practices and experience. Only ranking at the top on SERP is not enough, it’s not worthy unless and until you gain huge website traffic. So, Keep reading and gain more knowledge to perfectly optimize your website because best practices changes over time.
You may refer these awesome SEO Tools for tracking and analyzing your website. Good luck! According to SEO plan and strategy and a proper analysis of SEO you can hire a digital marketing company from where you can avail content marketing services, guest posting, email marketing, web development, etc for your client.