Question provided by Jonathan Rosen – an Ultra Light Startups member.
Answer provided by Andy LoCascio – President of Sound Strategies, Inc. an Ultra Light Startups affiliate
Jonathan‘s Question: How does one create a low cost SEO plan when the range of products they sell is extremely broad and not focused on category of products or services?
Andy’s Answer: Rather than think of this as a low-cost SEO plan, we need to address this as how to get maximum SEO benefit from a limited budget. You start by putting together a detailed keyword analysis. This will allow you to build a strategy based on competition and traffic for phrases that are most likely to generate sales on your domain. You could keep the cost of the analysis down by limiting it to just the higher margin items. Too many site owners skip this step and waste their efforts targeting phrases for which they can never obtain effective rank. If you are not in the top 5 in the retail world, you will not see any sales.
At minimum the keyword analysis must include the daily search volume and an assessment of the competition for each phrase. Assessing the competition is critical and involves examining the first page of results for the phrase and looking at factors such as page rank, titles, and page content for each result. However, it is important to realize that there are other factors that contribute to phrase rank.
If you use an SEO specialist to provide the keyword analysis, you should rely on their experience to help you arrive at the best strategy for your budget.
The keyword analysis will also provide you the information you need to get maximum benefit from your content. You should optimize your page titles and content based on the phrases you feel that you can compete for. Diluting your titles and content in an attempt to target phrases with stiff competition is a common mistake.
You also need to come up with a comprehensive plan for inbound link acquisition and link exchange. You are going to need a lot of properly formatted inbound links (with optimal anchor text). Once again, refer back to the item analysis and try to focus on specific items or groups of items where you have the best chance of success.
SEO is an investment in your website. Your goal is to get a reasonable ROI on the initial budget. During the campaign you will learn how your site interacts with the competition and then you can make an informed business decision about subsequent expenditures.
Additional Relevant Articles
- How to fail at SEO (without really trying)
- Maximize Your SEO Spend, Now!
- Get Linked! (Maximize Your Inbound Hyperlinks)
- New Website SEO
- Choose the Right SEO Specialist (linked above)
To ask your own question of Ultra Light Startups experts, fill in this form on the Ultra Light Startups website and check the ULS blog or the ULS email newsletter for the answer.
For more information on this and related topics, join us at SEO for New Websites in New York on March 4, 2010
Tagged as: seo
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