Ryan Darani is a freelance SEO professional. Ryan Darani is a freelance search-engine-optimization professional based in the UK. Designing an SEO strategy on a small budget can be challenging, but generating traffic is possible. Start by doing your research on the market and collecting data, and then build your brand awareness. Top editors give you the stories you want — delivered right to your inbox each weekday. Something is loading. Thanks for signing up! Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you’re on the go. Email address By clicking ‘Sign up’, you agree to receive marketing emails from Insider as well as other partner offers and accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . Competing in Google’s search results can be daunting. As an SEO consultant , I’ve worked with many startups that have small budgets but big aspirations, and the question I’m always faced with is, “How can we compete against X?” X is typically a brand with 20 years of organic SEO growth that dominates a particular industry. They exist in nearly every industry, and sometimes, there’s more than one. No startup wants to go head-to-head with a company with an SEO budget that exceeds seven figures a year. The answer to beating another company’s SEO is to find the gaps in their strategy and be tactical with how you regain market share from them. Here are five simple steps to start generating organic traffic to your website immediately, with a limited but well-placed budget. 1. Understand your total-addressable market Before you consider SEO a growth channel for your startup, you need to establish market demand in your niche. Search traffic is driven by billions of searches happening every day. Your job is to calculate exactly how many of these searches are relevant to your startup. You should be able to: Understand competitor market share Identify expansion opportunities Establish the intent of your market Knowledge on these fronts will help you understand two things: where you need to invest capital and where your biggest organic wins are going to come from. If you’re in the early stages of your business, chances are you won’t have much (or any) customer data to lean on for ideas. This is why, initially, we build growth strategies on keywords. 2. Collect the data Search data has become more reliable over the past decade, and you can now lean on tools like Ahrefs and Semrush to find what you need. You can leverage data points like: Estimated search volume: using third-party click data to estimate how many people search for a specific term or phrase each month Keyword data: what specific terms and related terms you should be using to generate traffic Traffic potential: a rough estimate of how much traffic the top organic result is generating from a keyword each month CTR (click through rate) curve models: an estimate of how many people click a website in the results page, which decreases as the position gets higher While […]
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