Ready to drive more traffic to your website but can’t spare thousands in ads?
Guess what? Neither can most small businesses. In fact, the truth is that 66.3% of small businesses don’t spend over $1,000 on marketing annually.
Wait, there’s more…
You don’t need a big budget to build serious traffic. Organic strategies deliver superior long term growth vs paid ads. Plus, they’re all free or very low-cost to implement.
Here are proven tactics that are working for businesses of all sizes today.
What You’ll Discover:
- Why Organic Traffic Beats Paid Ads for Small Budgets
- The Foundation: On-Page SEO Basics
- 4x Low-Cost Traffic Building Strategies
- How to Track Your Progress
Why Organic Traffic Beats Paid Ads for Small Budgets
Paid ads are exactly what the name implies: PAID. As soon as you stop paying the money, the traffic stops too.
Organic traffic is different. It’s 100% free after the initial work to rank for a keyword is done. Once a page ranks, that visitor flow will keep coming month after month as long as the page stays at or near the top. You do it once, it works forever. For bootstrapped businesses, this is exactly the leverage you need.
Imagine…
You publish one well-optimised piece of content. You rank for a keyword. Boom, that content now brings in visitors day in and day out without you having to lift a finger. For free. Contrast that with continuing to pay for each and every click with ads.
The math for small budgets simply doesn’t add up. You can’t possibly afford to outspend the bigger brands forever. But first, you need to nail the basics.
The Foundation: On-Page SEO Basics
Before you build anything, you need a solid SEO foundation. This means all of the on-page SEO elements like meta titles and descriptions, internal linking, and so on. If you’re like many businesses, you may be in the market for professional SEO services and solutions. For this, working with a trusted Ann Arbor SEO company can be a great way to accelerate results. But no matter how you do it, here are the fundamentals you need to get right:
- Page titles that include your target keywords
- Meta descriptions that entice clicks
- Header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc) that structure content
- Fast load speeds on both mobile and desktop
- Internal links that connect relevant pages
The on-page stuff tells Google what your page is about. When your pages are highly crawlable and the content can be easily understood by Google’s bots, your rankings improve.
Pretty simple, right?
The mistake most bootstrapped businesses make is they want to skip the hard work. They want to create new content but ignore their existing pages. Remember to fix the foundation first. Only then should you build on top of it.
4x Low-Cost Traffic Building Strategies
Finally, some strategies that will actually build traffic. These are low-cost approaches that all work.
Create Long-Form Content That Ranks
Content is still the cornerstone of organic traffic.
Key is to create something that actually serves your audience. Value. That’s the name of the game.
Thin 300-word blog posts are no longer enough. Search engines want in-depth resources that answer questions.
What works now:
- 1,500-2,500 word posts tend to rank highest
- Including images and videos can help
- Answer the questions your audience is searching for
- Keep paragraphs short and easy to skim
One piece of great content is worth ten of average. When limited by resources, quality over quantity.
Steal Your Competitors’ Backlink Strategy
You read that right.
This is one of the single best things a bootstrapped business can do to level the playing field.
Simple. Take your top 5 competitors who rank in the search results for the keywords you want to target. Throw those URLs into a backlink analysis tool. Bam. You now have a full list of every single site linking to them.
Easy. Now get those links for yourself.
Competitor got a link from a guest post? Pitch your own. They got mentioned in a forum discussion? Join that community. Earned a link from a resource page? Get your site added there, too.
Why re-invent the wheel? Blueprints for success are staring right at you. Free backlink checking tools like Ahrefs (limited trial available), SEMRush (freemium model) and SEO SpyGlass have all of this data.
Build Links Through Unlinked Mentions
This is one of the easiest tactics most businesses ignore.
Fact is that there are people already talking about your brand online. They are! But they’re not linking to you.
Unlinked mentions. Hidden goldmine.
Use Google search to find them:
- Search: intext:”Your Brand Name”
- Search: intext:yourwebsite.com
Sort through. See a mention without a link? Just email the site owner. Tell them thanks for the mention, can you please add a link to your site?
Most will say yes. Liked you enough to mention you once. They will likely be happy to link too.
Leverage Free Tools Like Google Alerts
Ever wanted to capture new mentions in real time?
Use Google Alerts. Set up an alert for your brand name and URL. Every time someone mentions you, Google emails you the link. Now you can go convert those unlinked mentions while they’re fresh.
It’s completely free and takes 5 minutes to set up.
Track Your Progress
You can’t improve what you don’t measure.
Bootstrapped business should be tracking at least these key metrics:
- Organic traffic in Google Analytics
- Keyword rankings for target terms
- Backlink count over time
- Click-through rates from SERPs
In fact, considering that 68% of all online experiences start with a search engine, being seen in those results is more important than ever.
Monthly check-ins will suffice. SEO is a long game. Expect meaningful results to take time.
Bottom Line
It’s 100% possible to build organic traffic with a small budget. In fact, it’s how the vast majority of successful businesses were started.
I hope you learned something new that you can take action on right now.
But also remember that it takes time for organic growth. If you master one of these strategies and implement it consistently, that’s a huge step in the right direction. Then move on to the next.
Bootstrap your way to sustainable growth.
