For small businesses and startups, SEO is a big deal especially when they are on a tight budget that’s supposed to cover online marketing too in addition to SEO. For such businesses, investing money and time in devising marketing strategies is not always easy. One option is to avail services from one of the many companies in the search engine optimization Dubai industry. But there will still be budget constraints. 

However there are a few ways you can actually forge an effective SEO strategy that wouldn’t exceed your budget. There’s a catch though. The strategy developed in this way will be robust enough to help your business grow. But in the long run, you will need better strategies to keep up with your competitors as many of them could have a competitive advantage over your business, more content or a million-dollar SEO strategy. 

Before you begin, you should be aware of the most valuable things you have in your possession - Time and Resources.

A large SEO strategy will be sophisticated as it takes into account a lot of variables that influence search engine rankings. But because you are on a shoestring budget, you should focus on specific aspects alone that, when combined, will yield outstanding results. 

Long-tail Keywords

Rather than using generally used keywords, go for long-tail keywords. Under a tight budget, it’s recommended to be focused on user intent to come up with a good SEO strategy. Long-tail keywords are mostly the byproduct of users who just want to find something without wasting a lot of time. These keywords would be specific to the customers’ needs. 

There are benefits to using them, including:

• Focus on user-intent and content production
  
• Comparatively lower competition compared to general keywords
  
• Drive more conversions as they deliver qualified traffic through online searches
  
• They are relevant to online searches from users who want quick results
  

The keywords are relevant to your audience but are still not competitive as their general counterparts on whom large corporations are betting on. The only thing to keep in mind here is that the content should be relevant to the search queries, and the long-tail keywords should not be overused in the content. 

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is a technique that basically expands your business’ reach while sharing your knowledge with a new audience. On top of this, guest blogging also helps you generate backlinks to your website. 

Here, you need to keep two things in mind.

• Never spam irrelevant content on websites
  
• Never publish content at all on websites with low authority
  

The main advantage of guest blogging is that it’s inexpensive. You just need to invest some time. Other advantages include helping you build new relationships, gain new followers, and increase visits (and in turn conversions) to your website. 

Here’s what you need to do.

• Step 1: Research and identify sites with good authority that accepts guest blogging
  
• Step 2: Produce content tailored to the readers
  
• Step 3: Get in touch with the editors and have your content published
  
• Step 4: Build the relationships, and post more content if possible
  

Local Optimization

Raising your website’s search engine ranks by focusing on competitive keywords requires time, effort, and money. Assuming you have the first two, you can focus instead on local or regional markets. If your business can dominate there, it will boost the growth rate of your business while providing a great ROI. 

Focus on local SEO. There are many methods to obtain good local SEO – getting listed in authoritative directories, tending to structure data markup, Google My Business, generating reviews etc.

Conclusion

For search engines like Google, the priority to give users a great experience surfing a website and going through the content. There are many ways to do just that. Because there are many variables involved, the best practices to nail SEO keeps changing. This means SEO can be done even at a low budget despite how it seems. 

If you can’t invest that much time and effort on marketing and SEO alone after just starting your business, you can still find a decent SEO services package from a reliable SEO firm. They come in a variety of price tags, but it’s not about the service. It’s all about the one who provides the service.