Low-Budget-SEO-For-Your-Website-To-Launch-Your-New-Business-Online

Low Budget SEO Tricks for DIY SEO

In this episode, Bob and Jesse discuss some low budget, DIY SEO tricks to help you launch your new business online. The pair discuss a lot of affordable and effective areas to put in the work to increase the SEO for your website and get found online. From the importance of establishing your Google My Business Profile, to creating citations and backlinks, these affordable insights will help virtually any business to improve their SEO and get found online!

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What you’ll learn

  • Why having a Google My Business profile and generating reviews is a great way to improve your SEO.
  • How to build relevancy and trust from Google.
  • Where to turn for building legitimate backlinks to benefit your SEO.

Transcript For Low Budget SEO For Your Website To Launch Your New Business Online – 115;

Caleb Baumgartner: Welcome to Local SEO Tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I am producer Caleb Baumgartner. Are you just starting out online with your business and looking for ways to improve your SEO? Jesse and Bob are here to bring you low budget SEO tips to help you build your online presence, improve your SEO and get found online. Like what you hear? Leave us a five star review on the platform of your choice and we may read that review on a future episode. Thanks for listening and enjoy the show.

Jesse Dolan: Welcome back to local SEO tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I’m your host, Jesse Dolan here with Mr. Bob Brennan. Once again. How are you doing Bob.

Bob Brennan: Good sir. How are you doing?

Jesse Dolan: I am doing good. Good to have you back in studio, even though we are in separate studios still. Ripped off a few solo episodes, which is fine, but it’s always a better episode, I think, when we’re on together. So looking forward to this. Today, we are going to talk about low budget SEO. And like we just said before we jumped on, that doesn’t mean no budget SEO, right? So this isn’t all going to be focused around DIY, but kind of a blend, right? As a business owner or a marketer, what are some of the things you can do yourself? What are the things maybe to outsource?

We’re going to talk about some of the basic things you have to for sure be doing and I think each of you listening out there, as Bob and I walked through it, are you doing this? Are you hiring somebody? Right? What’s your strengths? What’s your weaknesses? What do you like doing? What do you not like doing? And in playing to some of that, which shouldn’t be too foreign as a manager or an owner, right? You’re delegating and making these decisions all the time. Before we jump into that, want to mention as we always do, our instant SEO audit tool, go on out to localseotactics.com, click on the top right corner, yellow button. Can’t miss it. It’s a free instant SEO audit. You plug in your webpage. This is a tool that’s a page by page audit, plug in your page, plug in your keyword.

And it’s going to give you a quick report on what’s good with your website. What’s lacking and a punch list, a checklist for you to go through and start to make some changes, to increase your ranking. People have great, great success with that. You can do this. You can come back in two weeks, run it again, check your score. Does that correlate with ranking? And it’s great. It’s not the end all be all tool, but if you’re looking for, how do I get started right now? What should I do to increase the ranking on my site? Find out what keyword you’re trying to rank for. Find out which page on your website is the most relevant you want to score that, not just run everything on your home page and plug it in there.

And you’re going to get some good, good feedback that you can take action on right now. Check that out. Localseotactics.com. All right. So let’s talk about some low budget SEO. Bob, I will ask you a question that I’m pretty sure I know the answer to, what is the number one thing people should start with if we’re talking about local SEO?

Bob Brennan: GMB.

Jesse Dolan: GMB.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. I’m amazed. I’m just amazed at how many legitimate businesses that I know have the capability to show up in the GMBs they don’t. So-
Jesse Dolan: Yeah and we’re not going to talk so much about how to set it up, why to set up whatever. We’re going to touch on a few things that you should be doing with it. Let’s make the assumption that you have a GMB already, as we go forward in the conversation. If you don’t, GMB is a Google My Business, Google My Business listing. It’s a free thing that you can do, right within Google, go to localseotactics.com, search for our first few episodes. We walked through how to set it up, why to set it up, how to optimize and all that kind of stuff, right? We’re not going to to rehash that. Yeah, that’s the obvious answer, right? You got to have a GMB. We’re talking about low budget, that’s free, right? As a thing, Google doesn’t charge you to have a GMB.

You just got to put your time into it. So there are things you want to do on your GMB that are kind of regular ongoing. There’s agencies, ourselves included, that will do GMB SEO for you, whether it’s front to back, like help you set it up and get verified and optimize it, and then just do the ongoing stuff. Or if this is some stuff you want to do yourself and maybe outsource some of the ongoing, something that you’re going to definitely need to do for the ongoing is that continued posting to your GMB, Google posts, always be on the lookout for new business categories. I think we’ve talked before about once a week would be great, even once a month, at least. Log into your GMB account and just check and see, Google will send, I shouldn’t say send. They’ll post recommendations and changes that they want to make.

Maybe they think you’re a fit for a new category that you didn’t assign the first time, or there’s a new service within your business category that they think you should be listing for services you offer. So be checking into that. You can add this stuff mainly yourself, but also for sure review what they’re doing, but yeah. Low budget SEO, get yourself a GMB and get that thing going. So I got another super tricky question for you, Bob. I’m pretty sure you’re going to go two for two here. So you got a GMB. You’re doing some of them basic stuff I’m talking about. What’s the other number one thing you should be doing with that GMB?

Bob Brennan: Sometimes don’t you feel like we’re Penn & Teller, like I’m the quiet guy for a fact. No, it’s reviews, right?

Jesse Dolan: Totally.

Bob Brennan: What you’re driving towards.

Jesse Dolan: Totally.

Bob Brennan: So probably number one converting factor, you do not need to be at the top of what we call the three pack. Now, if you’re outside the three pack, you still want to get reviews, but this isn’t going to be as big of a deal. You need to be in the three pack. You don’t need to be at the top, but if you have more reviews and ideally we try to shoot for at least two to one, three to one over the competitor. The more reviews you have, the better chance of getting called in that three pack. And we’ve done it time and time again, it’s proven with our clients and with some of the businesses we own, you will see your calls go up at least 20%, if not 50%, when you have that ratio of a two to one review ratio over your competition.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah and that will impact your rankings over time. If people keep clicking on you, even if you’re not ranked one, Google sees that as a behavior. And they’re going to bump you up. Question for you, talking about like getting to a two to one ratio and reviews over competitors. I hit that, right? Let’s just say it takes me a couple of months, which is fine. We’re just organically doing it again, low costs. Me and my team were asking for reviews. We’re getting them, we’re not just leaving it to chance. We’re asking for reviews. I hit that two to one mark, what do I do there? Do I stop? Or do I keep going?

Bob Brennan: No. You want to keep… You definitely want to keep going and you want to keep an eye on your competition because what I’ve seen, at least with our businesses, I’ve seen the competition kind of wake up and they start getting reviews and then it’s a chase, right. And it’s a good chase. It reflects the market and we want to be providing great services to our clients and you’ve got to stay absolutely vigilant with that. And you can break into a new market. We kind of look at those too, to some degree and we kind of see where the fight isn’t. If there’s companies showing up in the GMB that have either no reviews or the reviews are bad, there’s great opportunity there. You just go to town, make sure you get your reviews. And lo and behold, you’ll get calls from that particular market.

Jesse Dolan: Right. Yeah. Have a GMB, get reviews. Right? There’s other things don’t get me wrong, but-

Bob Brennan: Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: Super, super huge.

Bob Brennan: You could have a relatively poor website, but if you do those things, it costs you almost nothing. I fail to see how you’re not going to… And the key to any of this is measured number of calls or whatever you’re getting before you just do some of this stuff, like I said, if it doesn’t go up at least 20 to 50%, I’d be shocked.

Jesse Dolan: Right. So what I will also say then, as an idea, so you’ve got your GMB, which again, everybody knows you do a Google search. That’s that map pack. That’s that three pack that local pack, whatever you want to call it, that’s what you’re seeing at the top of the Google results. Usually three business listed with some kind of like map geographic illustration there. Underneath that, you’re going to have the natural search results, which are web pages, individual pages from websites, whatever Google thinks is the top and most relevant. We’re going to talk about the website here in a second because you, for sure as a business, you have to have your own GMB. You have to have your own website to be in this game, but there is another spot here, that’s part of low budget SEO and that’s building citations is kind of a generic term that we use in the industry.

Really what that means is having business profiles in other things other than Google My Business. Right? So if you do a search for whatever the product or services that you’re selling in your local market, again, if it’s like auto repair Minneapolis, plug that in and you’re going to see the GMB three pack at the top, then you’re going to see a bunch of websites listed in that second part of the page. Within that, look for entries that are not actual business websites, right? Yelp, MapQuest, the BBB, any of these websites that have other businesses listed on them. If you can create a listing for your business on that website, you’re going to want to do that. That’s going to do a couple of things out there. One, it’s going to give you kind of more mentions of your business on other websites.

Google is going to pick up on that, say, Hey, Bob’s auto repair. Look, they’re on Yelp. They’re on Facebook, they’re on MapQuest, all these things. And I did say Facebook there that’s like social media. I would kind of lump that into the same thing. Just backing up. So build your citations, get listed on all these directories and set up your social media accounts. Even if you’re not going to be active on Facebook, if Bob’s auto is like an available Facebook name or handle, grab it, right? Save it. Put your name, address, phone number on there, put your logo in there, establish it. You want to do these things to show that you are legitimate. There’s Google updates all the time by we talk about this, but when Google releases a content update or a core update, I’m sorry, they’re trying to tweak their algorithm to show more relevant results.

AKA get rid of spam and irrelevant results. The more you can show you’re legitimate and relevant, the more trust you have in Google. That translates into SEO, just because you make a Yelp listing or a MapQuest listing or whatever it is. And there’s industry specific directories, those things aren’t going to rank and get your business found. Well, Google will see is, okay, here’s your overall digital footprint, digital fingerprints, all this ties together. This is Bob’s auto repair, your site and your GMB will get the impact of that because we will have more trust. You’ll have more authority in that. So grab your social profiles, grab all the citations, all the business directory listings that you can get your hands on. And within that, keep consistency. Your business name, your address, your phone number should be consistent across the board. So Google can assimilate all these, as the same entity.

And again, we’re talking Bob, low budget SEO. This could be a no budget area. You could do all this yourself. Pay one of your team members and employees that do F4 of course, an agency like us. These are like al a carte services that people will do all the time is to just kind of do this work for you. This is an area that’s pretty labor intensive for somebody who doesn’t do it regularly. So if you are looking to be low budget, you’re going to have a mix of low budget and no budget things, right? Because you kind got to do all this. You got to pick and choose where you’re going to spend your money, where you’re going to spend your time.
This might be an area you want to spend some money on just because what to look for, how to set them up, this could be pretty labor intensive if you’ve never done it all before, but for somebody who does it every single day, no problem to get your business set up in all these areas. So maybe if you’re picking between one of these two, Hey, take a stab at the GMB yourself, but maybe have somebody else help you with your citations, your social profiles and kind of connecting all those dots.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. And I’d throw a caveat out there, if you’re in a smaller town or you’re in a niche, that’s not competitive, definitely do it yourself. Or at least give it a stab. Right. As you get into a more competitive and thicker and deeper population, I think it’s definitely worth the investment of paying somebody and you will definitely get ROI. I would say you’d get ROI in what? Just 60 days. 90 days.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. Yeah because usually in SEO, I wouldn’t say yes to such short timelines, but we’re talking ROI. You’re not spending a ton of money for these things.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: Right. This is not thousands of dollars. It’s hundreds of dollars, maybe a thousand on the super high end, if it’s just very labor intensive for your specific niche or something. So yeah-

Bob Brennan: So it’s typically what… I mean bookends, what would you say if somebody outsources, what should they be spending?

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. You’re probably… A lot of this comes down to quantity of listings and things like that. You’re probably in a three to $700 range with us other services that you find online. So yep. And it’s definitely push button, easy button type stuff. Right. You just go do something else. This’ll get taken care of for you.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: With that too. If you’re doing it yourself, like you said, Bob, or if you’re paying somebody to do it, in the other version, you should still own all this going forward. Right. If you’re getting set up on Yelp, there’s a username and a login for Yelp. Right. Get that. Even if somebody else is doing this for you, get that, hold that, own that. Because at some point you’re going to need update Yelp. Right or log in there for something. That’s going to be true of all the citations, all these social profiles.

Don’t just get them set up. Get them set up and then own the keys for it later. All right. So we’ve covered getting low budget SEO, set up your Google My Business listing, get your business directory listings, get your citations. People talk about backlinks a lot for SEO. We’re not going to go out there and talk about how to create backlink networks, and tear a bunch of stuff. But we are going to talk about backlinks a little bit here. Because it’s definitely a powerful area of SEO. Google doesn’t want it to be as much anymore today. They keep trying to tweak their algorithm or D tuning it a little bit to have other things be more of a factor, but still backlinks is part of their core algorithm, even when they started and it still is pretty powerful signal today.

So first thing, when you create these citations, you’re creating backlinks, right? You’re getting a backlink from Yelp, a backlink from Facebook, things like that. So that’s kind of happening, but that’s not what we mean when we say backlinks. Backlinks are more of a direct, like you’re listed on a website somewhere and getting a link back. It’s not a listing of other businesses necessarily. It’s just another website linking. We’re talking local here, Bob, right? Local SEO. An area that we tell people all the time is go find local backlinks. Again, low budget or no budget. If you have a low budget, some things that you can do is usually sponsor something locally.

If it’s a youth sports team, you should vet this out first, before you go sign up and support the local T-ball team and get your name on the back of their Jersey and everything else for like whatever the sponsorship kit is, make sure that they have a website somewhere that actually has backlinks. Right? This is what we’re talking about here. So I’m going to talk about sponsoring or endorsing or helping things. But you want to make sure you vet that out, that they actually have a website with backlinks for their supporters, their sponsors, things like that.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. Chambers of commerce, who else? Rotary, maybe even.

Jesse Dolan: Organizations, associations.

Bob Brennan: Other civic organizations that you could be joining and seeing if you can get a backlink as well.

Jesse Dolan: Yeah. And some of those they’re going to have what, like you join, I’m making up numbers, but you joined for a hundred bucks and for joining at a price for the silver package of 150 bucks, you get a backlink on their website. Pay the extra 50 bucks, you’re going to get some networking and some stuff for being there, but paying that little bit more to get that backlink, that’s something that we’re talking about here. Yeah. Schools, churches, organizations, think about what’s local. What’s in every community, right? Those are the local things that we’re talking about. Seek those out, try to get listed with them and make sure that the backlink is a part of it. Now there is now a days there’s like no follow and do follow backlinks that people put out there, rewind a few years ago, all back links were, do follow back links.

Even still, if there are no follow backlinks, as some people do it now today, Google still sees that’s a backlink to your website. Let’s not make any mistakes about it. If it’s online, Google sees it. Google knows it. Google can parse it and draw relevancy. Even if it’s not like an official connection, right. Google bot can crawl it, know that it’s linking to your website and give you some credit for that. So don’t be bashful, seek those out, make a list. And this is a little bit more, again, that’s lower costs, but maybe a little more time. So more time budget, less monetary budget. And this was very much a relationship or a manual process to reach out to these organizations. And in some of them like the tee-ball sponsorship, which is kind of a super low example, but relevant and the rotary, things like that, you’re getting more than the backlink too.

Right? So it’s definitely worth some time and some energy there. Other people will do things with like scholarships at schools, whatever the minimal investment or level I should say is for your school, depends. But maybe you would do an annual scholarship for 300 bucks, for whatever. It’s the Intrycks scholarship. And now you’re linked on their website. And that can be great too, because you’re getting a backlink from a school, which from the eyes of Google, little more trusted like Bob and Jesse can just whip up a website and link to anybody, but a school just isn’t going to do that right as a convention. And so those backlinks from education, from government, things like that tend to carry a little more value just because of the supply and demand, right. The scarcity of it. So, that’s always a great source too. Whatever these backlinks are, try to have them have a local flavor and a local relevancy to it right there.

Local organizations are somewhere around you. If you’re in Minneapolis, you don’t need a backlink from somebody in Houston, Texas.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: That’s not going to hurt you. Go ahead and do that. But if you can focus in Minneapolis, that’s really what we’re talking about here. First and foremost.

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: We’ve got your GMB. We’ve got your citations, your business listings, talking about some local backlinks. Of course, you also have to have a website. Now, if you don’t have a website, do you want to start one up? There’s a bunch of low cost ways to do it. You can get set up on WordPress, fairly cheap, a lot are on Godaddy. They have web builders like built within your hosting plan. Or you can just have one click installs to set up WordPress.
It’s going to come up on default theme. You can just start typing away. The barrier to entry for having a website is pretty low, right? You can use Wix and Squarespace to make a really good looking website. You’re going to have, I don’t know, like starting at like 25 bucks a month, let’s say roughly, just kind of ballpark it for you, every month to be able to make a website within Square or within Wix, which may seem like a bit of a steep price for people. But when you get into a builder like that, it’s made to make awesome looking websites and make them very easy. Historically, although they’re getting better, historically those have been seen to be lacking in their SEO ability for some of the things you can manipulate and add information to, but they’re getting better as we go.

Bob Brennan: And I would throw out that’s just really a short term solution. So I mean, at 25, $30 a month and I get it for small business, that’s a lot of money. It’s really short-term and I would just say that you don’t want to build the heck out of it. Build it, do, do a good enough job. But then, if you find that it’s working and the GMB is working, don’t invest a ton of money into that site because ultimately your end goal is to build a full-blown WordPress site with a designer, or if you’re going to jump into it and do it yourself, then do it with a WordPress site. But invest in that. When you invest in a Wix or Godaddy or some other type of site, you’re building on their real estate, if you will.

Right. And that isn’t the optimal for SEO. Like you said, it is getting better, but you’ve just built a mansion on somebody else’s property and they can yank it at any time and you’re out of luck. And so it’s a good, easy start. Just like any of us, we had to rent apartments at some point and eventually we own houses. So, that’s where you start, but don’t… You wouldn’t invest $20,000 into an apartment and put granite and stuff in there because you don’t own the apartment. So, and that’s the same principle with these startup websites. They’re great starts. It gets a link to your GMB so you can get found. But then after that, save up your money and then invest in a proper site. Either build it yourself or have somebody else build it.

Jesse Dolan: And this would probably be an area, if we’re talking low budget, I’d probably try to do a lot of this other stuff myself and save my money to invest into the website. Right?

Bob Brennan: Right.

Jesse Dolan: Like you said, get some kind of designer on board. Maybe you have the ability yourself. If you do, great. If not, invest into designer. Somebody we follow about like Don Miller StoryBrand right. If you’re hiring a low end designer, who’s maybe just good at the graphic side, but not maybe brand positioning or presentation and just how you not just make this stuff look, but your messaging, I would take a pause right there. Just go check out the business made simple podcasts, StoryBrand podcast. You might still find it by the StoryBrand book, by Don Miller on Amazon, educate yourself on how to construct some of this and just fine tune it a little.

It’s not rocket science, but once you go through it, it’s like, there’s definitely an aha moment about, I think, a great way to illustrate it, as a business, we want to talk about the services we can provide to you. Right. Here’s what I have to sell you. Here’s what you can buy from me instead of like, what is the solving for you? Right. Like kind of value. You’re just flipping that around as a nuance, you’re getting people to your site. They have to want to engage with you at that point. Otherwise, SEO, all it did was get you found didn’t bring your business. Right? So I think this is getting into an area where investment starts to become a little more critical.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. But I’m a huge… I bootstrapped a couple of businesses and I’m a huge fan of crawl, walk, run, just as long as you’ve got to focus on where you’re going and then you’re measuring. You’re making sure every little investment you’re doing that you can measure if there’s return on that. And if there isn’t, then kill it or move a different direction, but if there is, you build on that. And that’s what we’re talking about here. I’m talking about the person that is either just starting the business out or they have no money. And this is where you focus for the next 30, 90 days. And then after that, once you see, oh, Hey, my calls doubled or tripled. Once I got into the three pack or whatever the case is, then you say, aha, okay, I’m going to invest $700 a month. Or I’m going to invest X amount of total dollars because I know I’m going to get return on investment.

Jesse Dolan: Yep and I think that is one of the beauty parts that we have gravitated towards digital marketing over the years is because you can go through those phases, right? You don’t have to launch your website as the finished final, I’m sure this is my website for the next five years type of a deal. Crawl, walk, run. You can go through those stages and throw up a page or a few pages, right. Again, make sure you’re talking about the products and the services that you sell, like we say all the time, if you want to be found for red balloons, make sure your website is talking about red balloons. You have a page about red balloons. So you want to have a number of pages on it that talk about your local area, geographically with location pages, product and service pages. But it can be like the most minimal version of that, that you need. Ultimately, to be crushing for SEO, longterm, you’re going to have hundreds of pages on your website that are landing pages for Google and all this kind of fun stuff.

But to your point, you don’t need that on day one or day seven or whatever it is. If you’re in this low budget, no budget type scenario, just make sure it looks good, right? It would be my only asterix on this. If you’ve been to a website that seems like it was made in the early 2000s, if it has like a MySpace flavor to it, I think the like average visitor depends on the niche and some other demographics, but like 15, 20 seconds or less is the average visit to a page from Google. Most of those are people that are bouncing back out, going to a different site, right? That’s what brings that average down, I guess is my point is the bounce.

You’re going to get a high bounce rate, which is, if somebody finds you in search, clicks on your link, comes from Google search to your website and then bounces out and goes to like the next result. That’s a bounce. That’s what keeps time on page low because I was there for seven seconds realized this is like a MySpace looking website. I’m not going to trust this person, this company, I’m out. I’m looking for another one. If you put all this energy into it and you’ve set up your social, your citations, you got your GMB and all this stuff. If they hit your website and then back out and go somewhere else, you just messed up the entire process right there. Right? You got your ranking, everything is working, but you didn’t convert and get that client. And like you’re saying, we definitely would want you to track how many phone calls, how many email submissions, how many people are walking into your store and mentioning your website, find a way to track all these things.

And you’ll find that the better your website looks, the more it resonates with the person that’s there and matches their intent. They’re going to stay on that page. Then they’re going to contact you. The longer they’re on your page, the more likely they’re going to actually contact you for your product and service. So make it look good. Have it be a good usability, something we’ve been talking about a lot, Bob is mobile first from a view standpoint, right? So not just making it look good, but make sure it looks good on mobile because that’s probably how the majority of your end customers are going to visit your website for the first time is on a mobile device and put yourself in their shoes.

You gained SEO position, hopefully on your website. And they click on this from the landing page. I should say, they click on this from Google. They hit your landing page. Do they want to stay there? Does it look good enough? If the answer is yes, then keep rolling. You’re going from crawl to walk now, right?

Bob Brennan: Yeah.

Jesse Dolan: Start measuring the amount of business you’re getting from this, start reinvesting, start making your website even sexier and just continue that. But don’t skimp on a website that looks out of date, untrustworthy, or any other bad signals that would just scare people off. You don’t want the tip of your spear being off-putting, right?

Bob Brennan: Yeah and I just think that’s, again, if you’re a novice, don’t worry about it. Just do the best you can with Wix or some of these Godaddy is really plug and play sites, but take everything Jesse said to heart, 30, 60 days down the road where, okay, I got to roll up my sleeve. Do any of us really to do this in our businesses? No. We’re good at being electrician or we’re good at being a roofer or whatever the case is. We didn’t start our businesses to become web designers, but it’s the new… That’s how you sell your business today. 30 years ago, you had a sales team and they went out and you took out newspaper ads or whatever the case is. Well, guess what? This is the new way of doing things and you got to get good at it.

And then there’s other ways to market your business outside of obviously the web industry. But that’s how it’s done. So you got to dig into it a little bit. And if it’s something that overwhelms you, do what I do. I’m a solid C plus student.

Jesse Dolan: Solid.

Bob Brennan: Solid. I can only take so much at a time. So I’ll absorb 45 minutes of it one day and I’ll wait and let a day or two go by and I’ll dig into it a little bit more and I’ll dig into it. I can’t sit down and do six hours of this stuff and whatever it might be, to take it all in. So, run your business. But then, like anything else, take a little spare time and absorb some of these podcasts and do your own research. But then, get to that crawl, walk, stage, and then look at investing more money into it.

Jesse Dolan: Right? I think that would be it too is investing more money. I tell people all the time, it’s not an expense, it’s an investment. And you should be, like we said earlier, we should be getting an ROI on this. Whatever you’re spending here, whatever you’re investing, it should be coming back to you. Maybe not in that first week or that first month, maybe this is a quarter by quarter thing, but it’s going to pay off. And when it is paying off, take a little more money out of that ROI, throw it back in because if you’re doing this on a low budget, I’m kind of projecting here, but there’s just no way you’re going to be dominating your competition on a low budget SEO. The point of this is to kind of get you in the game and get you started.

You want to be running. You want to be dominant, unless you’re in some tiny town with no competition and have a monopoly on your product or service, odds are you’ve got competition and any positive movement you make, impacts them negatively. They’re going to be coming back. And they probably aren’t in the low budget mode that you are, right? So they probably have more resources. So jump in there, get some ROI, reinvest it and keep scaling that up as soon as you can and get yourself to dominate. And I think that’s pretty good. There’s a lot more, you can go for technical on SEO and how to do a lot of things, but we’re talking low budget. I think again, if you can get your GMB set up, get your citations, your socials, get some of those local backlinks and get some kind of a good looking website.

That’s not going to scare people away. You should be doing pretty effective at your low budget SEO, with that. I am glazing over some things like keyword research, right? And page speed and all these technical stuff. If you want to dive more into some of the nuts and bolts on that, let’s just look at some of our past episodes on our podcasts. You’re talking about low budget. Our podcast is basically set up for DIY, right? If you’ve got time, Bob, if it’s 45 minutes on a wack, whatever it is, most of our episodes are 20 minutes. Thereabouts, there’s going to be a good nugget that you can apply in each one. Just kind of take some of that to heart and have that be part of your weekly routine.

Bob Brennan: And there’s nothing saying you can’t drink beer while you’re listening to our podcasts. So that’s… Take that time to crack yourself a beer and just relax and take it in.

Jesse Dolan: Beer, Bourbon, coffee, it depends what time of the day it is. During the middle of the day, maybe a mix, some of those two together, kind of bridges the gap. I don’t know, to each his own. All right, hopefully that helps some of you out there that are looking for some low budget SEO solutions in all of these areas. Again, don’t be afraid to throw some money at some professionals. Like we always say, there’s like free with a headache or there’s headache free. Right? You got to pay for headache free. If you can be strategic and align with what do I like to do? Okay. The things we just mentioned, if there’s certain areas you’re like, yeah, I can do that. Then do those things. You’re going to be motivated. You’re going to be good and probably talented. But those other areas you’re like, I don’t know. I don’t want to do that. Okay. That’s probably a great spot to maybe look at throwing some money at somebody else to do it then. Right Bob? And then it would get done. So.

Bob Brennan: Yeah. Well, and just try to still get some education on it. So whoever you hire isn’t taking it to the bank.

Jesse Dolan: Yes, absolutely. You still got to be in control just like those citations, right? Like own the keys, get those keys when you’re done. Same thing for the SEO knowledge, for the tactics and for what’s been applied. All right. So hopefully that helps some of you out there, if it does, if it did and if you think you’re getting value from this podcast or from this YouTube show, we’d like to get a review from you. That’s kind of our ask from everybody. If we’re bringing you value, throw some back at us. Go to localseotactics.com, scroll down to the bottom and click the button for reviews. You got Facebook. What else? Google My Business. Of course. And Stitcher, different podcasts outlets. We’d love to know if we’re helping you and bringing you some value. And you can tell us that by leaving us a review. If you do that, we’re going to give you a quick shout out on the episode.

And we’re going to read the review like I’m going to do here. We’ve got a good five-star review. Review is follow these guys, do what they say, get results. If you can’t do it, at least you will know and be educated if you need to hire a professional agency. Thanks for all the knowledge you guys give us. You deserve no less than five stars.

Thank you. Yes. Thanks a ton. And I think that was a great one that kind of went with the spirit of this episode, right? Like learn, do what you can do, no budget, if you need to hire an agency, at least you’re educated. Right. And you kind of know what you’re talking about here too. Through the process. Either way shows like ours and other ones as well, just get educated and learn more about what you’re doing for SEO here, and then you can apply it. All right. Bob, any other closing thoughts for this topic?

Bob Brennan: No. Just get in there, dig in there, be patient, do a little bit at a time, I would think. You could figure this out, shoot, I don’t know, an hour a week, hour or two a week. You’ll probably get a good stab at it within 30 days and you’ll start to see results probably within 60.

Jesse Dolan: Right. Right. And then you’ll start to see, as you’re searching as a user, you’ll start to see some of the stuff in the wild too. And kind of things start to click once you see what’s happening in the game. So all right everybody. Thanks for tuning in on this episode. We’ll catch you on the next one.

 

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