All SEO’s get clients or customers who want instant results on a small budget.

I think the key to doing SEO in a noticeably short period, is knowing which SEO tasks to prioritize. I have done it and so have my team.

WE decided to do a little experiment, to achieve the impossible and get SEO results fast and quickly on a small budget.

Here is how we approached this experiment.

We had a client (cellular shop) who wanted to market to their current clients, new fibre clients, handsets, and accessories clients by providing upscale, interaction-forward services and products.

They currently do not rank well for [cellular shop near me] or any other relevant keywords in their area.

They have an extremely poor Google Business Profile, not claimed either and no Bing for business listing at all.

We really started from nothing.

R5,000 does not sound like a lot, yet it is in the middle of the R2,000 to R7,500 range identified as the most common average budget in South Africa for small to medium businesses SEO.

Back to our new client: their business goal is to get more clients and boost revenue and to do that, they need more conversions, which they want to measure in the following ways:

Phone calls.

WhatsApp and Telegram messages.

Information forms completed on their site.

They believed that the way to achieve this was too simple “show up on Google (search engines).”

During our introduction meeting, the team convinced them that SEO was the best way to start and if done well, it will help to rank well on search engines (Google and Bing etc.) in the long-term.

We agreed on R5,000 budget and a month-long trial period and after the month, we will re-evaluate to see where the website is at and determine how to proceed.

We knew they will want to see tangible results after the trial period or they will not move forward with R5,000 per month for SEO.

The Client

·        Business: Cellular, fibre and communications.

·        SEO monthly budget: R5,000. We agreed on a super low rate of R400 per hour for in this experiment

·        Total hours allocated to project: 12.5 + 12.5 bonus hours form us for the first month.

·        Timeline: 1 Month (four weeks) trail with a further 6 months extension if successful.

·        Location: South Africa.

·        KPI (“Key Performance Indicators” which are “Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.”): Increase in calls, messages or forms completed on their website.

Here is our plan and how we did it

We did not know the site’s history and needed to uncover any potential issues that could sabotage our best SEO efforts and had to run a complete technical audit (especially in a case like this where it is a completely new engagement).

We did not want to use what little budget we had on trying to optimize a website that will not perform well due to technical errors. That would be a total waste.

Week One

Week one started with the complete and comprehensive technical audit (crawl)of the site and took us just over 2 hours to complete as it was not very robust site.

After our SEO tool finishes crawling the site, we looked at the error list and found that it was longer than expected. We had to prioritize and make a list which errors are the most critical for our SEO goals, and how to fix them first.

We divide the list into errors that was easy to solve in a short amount of time and ones that were not. Our standard practice is to fix errors marked as ‘critical’ or ‘error’ first, and that is then also where we started.

The most pressing errors we noticed were:

·        Pages not passing the mobile-friendly site test

·        Several pages are blocked for indexing

·        Render-block resources

·        Excessive Dom size

·        Images elements have no explicit width and height or alt text

·        Pages with terribly slow page load times

·        No structured data implementation

While fixing these errors, we had to put in some extra work adjusting server settings and to find the easiest and most sustainable areas to improve page speed.

On top of that, some of the admin functionality was not working as anticipated, making normally quick edits turn into research and troubleshooting for the team.

Hours Used First Week: 9.5.

Estimated Number of Hours Left: 15.5

Week Two

Week two and we continued with the technical fixes of critical errors, and this took us little longer than planned, but it was necessary to set the site up for success.

Our priority for this week was to get the client’s site set up on Google Business and Bing for business, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and all Bing for business tools.

We started by setting up Google Analytics and Google Search Console, submit the sitemap and move on to Bing for business tools.

Now it was time look at Google My Business and Bing for business.

We set aside more time for this task as we know its importance and need to do some work to optimize for “cellular shop near me” and “top cellular shop near me.”

We then made sure the listed business information was correct and had all the necessary info clients could need and included NAP (name, address, phone number), business hours and the services my client offers.

WE optimized the Google and Bing listings after we have completed some keyword and content research.

Hours Used This Week: four.

Estimated Number of Hours Left: eleven.

Week Three

Week three was about keyword, competitor, and content research as we budget a fair amount of time for each of these tasks, but overall, we budgeted to spend less than 8 hours doing this.

We begin with keyword research. As we expected, there was a fair amount of competition for these keywords, but the search volume for applicable keywords was high.

We proceed to determine which keywords were the best for this website. We entered these keywords into our preferred SEO tool to track them and start our competitor research. We want to see what their competitors are ranking for and the kind of content they are producing and do this by performing a gap analysis.

As it turns out, well-ranking cellular shops in the area are producing a fair amount of written content. That goes on the list of things we want my client to work on in the future.

Hours Used This Week: seven.

Estimated Number of Hours Left: four.

Week Four

Week four we optimized for the keywords we want the cellular shop to rank well for. This we did through both on-page and off-page SEO.

We know that creating content was a priority, but first we were more concerned about the overall site structure being poorly optimized.

We tried to fix the structure in the hope of improving user experience, crawlability. We optimized the page builder, image sizes and alt text for images hoping to further improve the site speed.

We then add meta tags, headers, and body copy that is specific and keyword-focused to lead-generating pages and indexed the pages we have worked on and completed.

Lastly, we spend about an hour adding content to the client’s GMB and Bing listing including photos, posts, and lots of content that was readily available.

At the end of the month, we used our SEO software to do an audit of the website again, to see how it has improved and is performing.

Our findings

Our report detailed the extent of the work we did in the 4 weeks, and we added recommendations for continued SEO work.

Our goal was to communicate the importance of the SEO work that we did and to explained to the client the foundation and value that was built for future SEO success and the importance of it and the added value to their marketing in the future.

Our plan for follow-up SEO work:

·        To bolster the content on the site,

·        Solve more technical SEO challenges

·        Structured data implementation

·        Continue to target keywords pertaining to user intent

·        Build the client’s local search presence so to rank well organically and in Map Packs.

Conclusion

We were happy with our results for the first 4 weeks of this project and felt we have accomplished most of our goals we set out to do with our budget of R5000.

It was our goal to lay a solid foundation for SEO in the initial phase and start the client on the path to ranking well for keywords that relate to the services and products they offer.

SEO requires patience and planning, but you can get the results you want, and your client expect, if you can prioritize what is most important.

We resolved a lot of technical errors, created Google My Business and Bing for Business listings, map locations, complete the necessary research, and began doing on-page SEO work.

The cellular shop website is now able to rank better both in organic search results and show up well amongst other Map Pack listings.