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Make no mistake about it – SEO can be quite expensive but you can start SEO for free.
Between paying for SEO tools, agencies, and consultants, the bills can certainly rise up.
For those who don’t have the same budget as major organisations, getting started in the SEO game can definitely feel overwhelming.
But you’ll be glad to know that you can get SEO results for absolutely free – you just need to know what tools to use and you need to dedicate some time every week into doing the work.
In this article, we’re going to walk you through exactly what you need to do to in order to see results for free.
It goes without saying, you’re going to need a website to carry out your SEO campaign on.
Most of you will already have a website but for those that are still in the early stages of planning their business website/blog here’s what we’d do.
This is the only part of this guide which can’t be done for free. Depending on whether you need a domain and advanced features, prices can range from £3 to £40 a year.
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Before we even get into the actual SEO and improving upon your web presence, the very first thing you must do is set up your analytics properly.
Only through knowing the metrics associated with your site will you know whether your SEO campaign is working effectively and what you need to concentrate on.
The very first and the most important tool that you can set up is Google Analytics.
And not to mention, you can look at your secondary metrics. A great example would be your dwell time (the amount of time that someone spends on your time before returning to the search engine results) – a great way to gauge the quality of your overall website.
Whilst Google Analytics is the most important tool for any SEO campaign, we highly recommend that you pair it with Google Search Console.
Google Analytics is incredible for gaining an insight into your overall website, you’re going to want to collect information about your rankings and the amount of clicks coming from the search engine itself – this is where Google Search Console comes into play!
Once you have everything set up, the very first thing that you’re going to want to start with is ensuring that your basic technical SEO is set up properly.
The 3 steps below can be done for free and will make sure that your website performs at a level that is good enough to enter the search engine rankings.
An SSL certificate tells Google and website users that your site is secure. Since 2014, it’s become a ranking factor for Google’s search result algorithm.
You can install an SSL certificate by doing the following:
And the following organisations offer basic SSL certificates for free:
Not having an SSL certificate will prevent your website from reaching it’s full potential and now there’s no excuse for not having one.
The next free thing that you can do to improve upon your technical SEO is to make your page speed faster!
Did you know that the majority of mobile site visits are abandoned within three seconds if your site doesn’t load within three seconds?
Luckily here are three beginner friendly things you can do to improve upon your site speed:
Using large images on your webpages can significantly impact your site speed. After all, these are large files that the user needs to load in order to visit your site.
To reduce your site speed you can compress your images file size to be smaller whilst maintaining a similar quality image. There are two ways in which you can do this:
This is probably the easiest way to get a good increase on your site speed if your images have not already been optimised.
The next beginner-friendly and free way to improve your site speed is through enabling browser caching. This allows the user’s browser to store information on your site, allowing for them to load your site faster upon the next time of visiting.
Here’s what we would usually recommend:
However, that is not free so here’s the free alternative:
The next thing you can do to immediately and easily speed up your site speed is to eliminate all unnecessary plugins.
Think about whether you truly need each plugin and try to be strict with yourself – too many plugins can lead to a range of problems, such as:
Generally speaking, the less plugins you have, the faster your website will load.
The only plugins that may be worth keeping for the sake of site speed are plugins like WP-Rocket and Smoosh which help you with caching and image compression.
The next thing you can do for free to improve upon your technical SEO is to ensure that your website is mobile friendly.
Here are some little-known facts about the importance of mobile-friendly websites
Here are two ways in which you can ensure that your site is mobile-optimised!
The very first thing you need to do to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly is choosing a mobile responsive theme.
This means that when your website is presented to mobile users, everything is resized so that it’s more visually appealing to them.
WordPress mobile-responsive themes include:
We’re a big fan of Astra for smaller websites.
Nothing gets a mobile user to leave a web page more effectively than a constant stream of popups.
Not only is it annoying but pop ups can be difficult to close for mobile users – leading to them becoming frustrated with your site.
We recommend the following:
When it comes to on-page SEO, things get a little bit tricker to do whole thing for free (especially if you’re running a business too) but it can still definitely be done.
We’re going to split it into three parts: research, production, and optimisation
When doing keyword research you’re trying to do two things:
One of the problems you may run into is that the best keyword research tools on the market require a monthly subscription.
Lucky for you the tools below offer a free daily limit on the amount of keyword research you can do. When used together, you’ll be able to do a sufficient amount of keyword research:
Now it goes without saying but writing a blog article can be done completely free. Even better, you can use Chat GPT to conduct research into the topic before writing it yourself.
Whilst you can’t outsource it to professionals, you can still adhere to the following steps to ensure that your article has a chance at ranking.
The last beginner-friendly and free step of content production is to ensure that your piece of content is optimised to get in front of your target audience.
By optimisation we mean making sure that you’re giving off signs that you’ve made this content for a specific keywords – here’s how you can do this:
The most difficult aspect of carrying out an SEO campaign is going to Off-Page SEO by far. People often pay for backlink services, other websites to provide backlinks, or for someone to write a guest post.
Lucky for you we have two ways in which you can make great strides in your Off-Page SEO.
To compensate for your lack of money, you’re going to have to use sweat equity – meaning you’re going to have to work hard. This is the more time-consuming one out of the two strategies but also the most rewarding.
Here’s how it works:
Like we mentioned, this can be quite time consuming to pump out high-quality articles on a regular basis for other people. This is why we included the next step… swapping backlinks.
In a similar vein to reaching out to write a guest post for bigger websites, you can reach out to similar sized websites and ask to swap backlinks.
Here’s how this works.
Whilst this won’t work for bigger websites as they have no need for your backlinks, this works well for websites that are on the same level as you.
If you do want backlinks from bigger website (which will fast track your progress), you will need to usually provide a financial incentive.
Here are our favourite SEO tools that you can use for free:
Hopefully this article was helpful with regards to starting an SEO campaign for free.
If you want to read more about the topic, the guys at WebFX have a great article which you can check out here.
If you want to stick around to read more about SEO, check out this article from us.
