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  2. How do you manage SEO on a budget as a startup

How do you manage SEO on a budget as a startup

Lixin Liu
6 replies
With limited resources, Have you found ways to boost your ranking without shelling out for pricey tools or consultants? Share your top hacks or low-cost strategies that gave you real results!

Replies

Sergey Koshevoy
Planyway
When we started, we focused on a few low-cost SEO tactics that really helped. First, content quality was key—writing blog posts that answered specific questions our audience was searching for (think long-tail keywords) brought in organic traffic. We used Ahrefs. We also focused heavily on on-page SEO basics like optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, and internal linking, which took some time but made a noticeable difference. For backlinks, we reached out to other small sites in our niche for guest blogging or simple link swaps but it's a hard job to do.
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Lixin Liu
@koshevoysergey Have you ever thought about outsourcing or hiring full-time employees to do this? How do you measure the cost? Because SEO optimization takes a long time and it's hard to evaluate the work results of outsourcing or employees.
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Gabriel Lisboa
Hey @liulixin I'll share a real story from my last business (2017-2020), evolvemvp.com (Portuguese). We reached with this strategy: - 1k/month unique visitors in 1 year (2018) - 10k/month unique visitors in 2 years (2019) - 30k/month unique visitors in 3 years (2020) - Using our knowledge about our customers, we research keywords with 0-500 searches/month and low difficulty to rank - We posted at least 1 blog post/week containing 2k-3k words This strategy was free. Of course, we needed to invest our time. But this process works, we only need patience and consistency. Nowadays, as a solofounder, things are a little different. More to do and less time/people to work. That's why I created ranqio.com, an affordable SEO Tool for Solofounders. You can find long-tail keywords and create blog posts using AI. I appreciate it a lot if you can test it and give honest feedback about it.
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Lixin Liu
@ogabrielisboa appreciate for the reply and thanks for sharing the data you made. I'll try it. I'm just curious, are there any significant differences in keywords strategy between when you first started your business in 2018 and now? how did you start at the beginning? thanks a lot!
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Gurkaran Singh
Launching soon!
SEO on a budget? Challenge accepted! Start with killer content and basic keyword research—Google's Keyword Planner is free, after all. Plus, if data science can find your "Her Ideal Match," it can definitely help you tweak a blog post. It's all about smart, consistent effort without breaking the bank.
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Lixin Liu
@thestarkster Thanks for replying! Great advice on content and backlinks! Have you ever contemplated outsourcing or employing full-time staff to undertake this task? How do you assess the associated costs? Given that the process of SEO optimization is rather time-consuming, it is quite challenging to evaluate the outcomes of the work carried out by either outsourced parties or employees.
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