It is believed that free website promotion to top positions in search engines is impossible. Nevertheless, there are ways by which you can bring the Internet resource to high places in the SERP and receive search traffic without investing money.
We make a reservation that this is primarily possible for commercial niches with low competition or information materials on narrow topics in which the authors have good expertise. In cases where website promotion is required for high-frequency and competitive requests, you can’t do without investments (cash, resource, or time).
If you want to save money, you should spend a lot of time on website promotion. Besides, you must have certain knowledge and skills to correctly do the actions necessary to promote your site without contacting a web studio, agency, or private specialist.
Why we want free promotion
Statistics of requests “free promotion” clearly shows that the demand for independent work in the field of SEO is high. Why do people want to promote websites with a minimal budget?
The 1st reason – young business simply does not have a budget for online advertising. There is a fear that agencies will take money for work every month, without guaranteeing anything, and there will be no effect from the promotion. Perhaps someone from this group has already worked with inexperienced freelancers, so they have such an opinion about SEO as a service.
Secondly, many people find SEO easy. The network has a lot of materials on optimizing and promoting sites in search engines, so you can do everything yourself, according to ready-made instructions and get the desired result without paying for the services of specialists.
If the motives of the first two groups are clear enough, then the third thesis requires clarification. Let’s see if search engine promotion is easy for anyone? Next, we briefly consider the features of website promotion, highlighting the required skills, time, and other costs, as well as possible problems.
Internal optimization
Internal site optimization is a set of measures aimed at improving the indexing and visibility of site pages in search engines. This is the most important stage of promotion, including the stages from developing a strategy to filling the site with content and optimizing usability.
Stages of internal optimization
What stages and necessary steps does the process of internal website optimization include?
Promotion strategy development
A correctly chosen strategy in many respects determines the success and speed of website promotion. For its formation, it is necessary to understand what goals and in what time frame we are trying to achieve. Simply put, an SEO strategy is an action plan to achieve a specific goal for a specified period.
Competitor analysis
Skills required to complete the task
Experience with services Serpstat, Similarweb, Megaindex, Ahrefs.
Time required:
10-20 hours, depending on the number of competitors and the degree of familiarity with these services.
It should be borne in mind that not always real competitors in business are also competitors on the Internet. If the task is to seize an advantage in the online sector, it is more correct to analyze first of all the top results, and not just the websites of competitors in the industry known to you.
The collection and clustering of the semantic core
Skills required to complete the task:
Ability to work with services for selecting and clustering queries
Ability to work with spreadsheet editors MS Excel or Google. Tables.
Time required:
From 20 to 80 hours, depending on the specialization of the company.
The semantic core is a list of search queries that potential customers use when searching for products or services offered on a site. All further work on promotion (internal optimization and work with external factors) is carried out following the list of requests collected at this stage.
The collection and clustering of the semantic core is one of the main and fundamental actions for website optimization. Only a correctly selected and correctly grouped semantic core will ultimately attract targeted organic traffic.
Content optimization
Skills required to complete the task:
Ability to write high-quality sales and informational texts;
Skills of working with CMS – site content management system – for placing texts on the site pages.
Time required:
Depending on your copywriting skills and the amount of content you need. Tentatively – 8-20 hours for a small service site and ad infinitum when it comes to an information resource.