Is SEO Cheap?
If you’ve been involved in SEO or know a little about it, you’d know that while the channel is organic, the cost of bringing in organic visitors isn’t always cheap. Or let’s not call it cheap—let’s say economical.
But if you’re just starting, or if you’re already doing well with other channels and want to give this SEO thing a try, you might be looking to get the most out of a limited budget.
And yes, as a business owner, that’s a smart move. It makes sense to test the waters first—see if it delivers results—and then decide whether to go all in.
So, is it possible to test or start with a low budget? Well, based on my experience in SEO, you can start with a small investment and scale up if the results make sense.
Should I Test The SEO for My Business?
So, you’ve decided that maybe SEO is the channel you should focus on. Or perhaps you’ve noticed it’s working for your competitors and figured it could work for you too.
Right?
When starting, one of the first things to check is how competitive your niche is.
If you can list around 20-odd businesses in your space, and all of them are driving leads and sales through SEO, then you’re in a competitive niche.
But don’t let that discourage you. Entering a competitive niche isn’t a bad idea. With a smart, bold, and consistent strategy, you can still bring in traffic. However, it’s important to know that gaining traction in a competitive space will take time and effort.
Now, if your business has no direct competitors or is based on a completely fresh idea, SEO might not be the best fit right away. In this case, your priority should be to educate your audience. You can create pages on your website that focus on educating users, but don’t expect search engines to drive significant traffic immediately—it will take time to establish that first connection.
Here are some additional criteria when a business might not be ready to start SEO:
1. Unclear Target Audience
If you’re not clear on who your audience is or what they are searching for, SEO might not deliver results. Without a well-defined audience, it’s hard to create content that resonates or targets the right keywords.
2. No Search Demand
If there’s little to no search volume for the product, service, or topic your business offers, SEO efforts might not be worthwhile initially. You’d be better off focusing on building demand through other channels like social media or paid ads.
3. Short-Term Goals
SEO is a long-term strategy. If your business needs immediate results—like a seasonal campaign or quick sales—investing in SEO right now might not align with your timeline. Paid ads or direct marketing would work better in such cases.
4. Limited Resources
SEO requires time and resources for content creation, website optimization, and monitoring. If your business doesn’t have the budget or capacity to sustain ongoing SEO efforts, it’s better to wait until those resources are available.
5. Weak Website Foundation
If your website is poorly designed, slow, or difficult to navigate, starting SEO might not yield significant results. It’s crucial to fix technical issues and ensure the site is user-friendly before investing in SEO.
6. Unrealistic Expectations
Businesses that expect instant rankings and traffic may find SEO disappointing. It’s essential to align expectations with the reality that SEO takes time to show results.
In most cases & if you understand how SEO works, it is good to start it if you haven’t now.
5 Ways You Can Leverage SEO Results Without Costing You Much
1. Set Up Free Tools (If You Haven’t Already)
Google provides free tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics to track your website visitors and gather insights to refine your SEO strategy. These tools offer valuable data as you gradually build your SEO campaign.
If you haven’t set them up yet, you should do it as soon as possible. Who knows—your SEO blog might go viral, and you’ll want to track all that traffic!
There are also other free tools that can help monitor and improve your website’s performance. For example, Microsoft Clarity offers heatmaps and video recordings of user sessions, giving you insights into how visitors interact with your site.
Oh, and if I forgot to mention, we also have an SEO tool called Serpple. It’s a keyword tracking and research tool that offers a 14-day free trial on all plans. You can explore its features to track rankings and find relevant keywords without any upfront cost. It’s an excellent way to get started with keyword research on a budget.
2. Get The Website Technical SEO Strong
Technical SEO is often overlooked or misunderstood. However, when you’re just starting out, you don’t need to overcomplicate things. Many technical SEO tasks only need to be done once during your website’s lifespan.
Think of technical SEO as the foundation of your website—the pillar that supports a strong and stable structure.
Here are a few basic tasks you can handle, even if you’re not very technical:
- Robots.txt creation and maintenance: Ensure search engines can crawl your site properly.
- Sitemap creation: Help search engines discover your content easily.
- Website speed: Optimize loading times to improve user experience and rankings.
- Internal linking: Connect your pages effectively to guide visitors and search engines.
Taking care of these few factors can help ensure efficient crawling and a better understanding of your website’s structure by search engines.
Note: Pay attention to the crawl depth of your website. Ideally, every page should be no more than three clicks away from your homepage. This makes it easier for Google crawlers to access and map all your pages.
3. Build Free Tools That Your Target Audience could Likely Use
We all love tools that are free and help us get things done. Building simple, free tools can be a great strategy. These tools encourage your audience to spend time on your website, which sends an indirect signal to search engines that your site offers valuable content.
Over time, search engines may reward this engagement by ranking other pages of your website higher. However, it’s important to remember that content quality remains a key factor. No matter how good your tools are, low-quality content can harm your website’s reputation and performance.
This ties into Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) guidelines. If you’re not experienced or knowledgeable about a topic, it’s better to avoid writing about it. Google is unlikely to reward content that lacks credibility or expertise.
When building free tools, make sure they align with the needs of your target audience. Offering something unrelated to your audience’s interests will either attract the wrong visitors or fail to gain traction on search engines. Focus on creating tools that genuinely add value within the scope of your niche.
Over my experience, I have seen that these tools tend to rank sooner on search engines. If they start ranking soon, it is a good sign that you are adding value & search engines like Google is giving preference to your content. However, just don’t build any free tool for the sake of it, if you are unsure that your TA would use it or not.
The best way to look for something is see if your competitors have already made some, or ask your real customers.
4. Do Basic Link Building
Link building has always been a key part of any SEO campaign. However, as Google continues to evolve, it’s becoming harder to earn quality backlinks unless your content provides unique stats, trending insights, or high value.
Additionally, building high-quality links often involves a significant investment of time, money, or both.
That said, if you’re just testing the waters, you can still focus on basic link-building strategies that help Google recognize your website as a legitimate business. These steps are easy, cost-free, and effective:
- Add links to your website from all your social media profiles.
- If you’re a stakeholder in the business, link to your website from your LinkedIn profile.
- For local businesses catering to specific geographic areas, link your website to your Google My Business profile.
These basic links may not carry the same weight as high-authority backlinks, but they’re a great starting point to establish your online presence and help search engines identify your business.
4. Use Parasite SEO
If you are somewhat familiar to what Parasite SEO is you must be knowing how it is still a thing in the SEO world. Just to give you a brief, it is a method where you use other website’s authority to your advantage and therefore know as Parasite SEO.
It is a long method to convince someone to write for you or advertise for your brand when you are new. However, using UGC websites, the one like Medium.com is a great way to start free.
And guess what Google over the past 2-3 years have preferred ranking UGC (User Generated Content) over the new or even the established websites. Earlier this month, I saw a post on LinkedIn where he was supporting this statement.
Here is the link to that post. The point is distribute your content through these platforms (Medium, LinkedIn Pulse etc.). They have high authority and when you don’t have to work extra.
Just post whatever blog you write on your website. However, make sure drop a disclaimer on every post about the original link which will be from your blog.
Having consistent here can give you the free traffic too, we have been doing it for one of the brands that was ignoring it just for the sake that they wanted to rank their website page only. But now, some of the content from Medium is also ranking for their keywords with their original page. Helping them to acquire more real estate within the SERPs.
Below is the screenshot of their Medium Stats.
Still early days, but why would you ignore if it is just one of the free way to distribute your content.
5. Build a Community around your Product
This might not be directly related to SEO, but it’s an important layer that complements your efforts.
If you’re growing traffic, one of your main goals should be to keep visitors connected with your brand. A community helps you build trust and loyalty, making people more likely to return to your site.Here, your audience can ask questions, share ideas, and engage with your brand in a more personal way.
Why you should consider building it?
- It positions your brand as a trusted resource in the industry.
- Engaged members are more likely to recommend your product or service to others.
- It keeps your audience informed about your product updates, which increases their interest and involvement.
A quick overview of how you can start?
- Add a CTA to your website: Invite your visitors to join your community. Place the CTA on high-traffic pages, like your blog or homepage, with a message like “Join our community for updates and exclusive discussions!”
- Promote on social media: Share links to the community on platforms where your audience is active, like Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn.
- Choose the right platform: Discord is a popular choice for building interactive communities. You can also use Facebook Groups, Slack, or WhatsApp, depending on where your audience feels most comfortable.
What you as a brand can share in the community?
- Industry insights and tips.
- Product updates and upcoming features.
- Space for members to ask questions or discuss industry trends.
Creating a community, you not only build stronger relationships but also encourage repeat visits to your site. Community members often become brand advocates who might share or link to your content, indirectly helping your SEO efforts as well.
One of the best approaches, once your SEO efforts and community building start showing results, is to introduce an affiliate model. However, that’s beyond the scope of this blog, so we’ll leave it at that for now.
Conclusion
In 2025, I would recommend you to do SEO for every platform you make, and the above points just apply to each platform your audience is at. Make sure you messaging is consistent across all the platforms, you respond to them at each platform & build relaton with them at every touch points.
We at Serpple provides a tool to keep consistency over your SEO campaigns. You can check out our Keyword rank tool, Keyword Suggestion & Competitor Tracking tool.
