The $100 SEO Makeover
We got a 65% bump in traffic just by making a few small changes. Fancy SEO consultant not required.
SEO is magic. Like casting a spell, with a few words, you can change your future. When I was searching for ways to improve traffic to Playdom.com on a shoestring (read: $0) budget, it was the first place I looked.
Low-Hanging Fruit
I’m not some sort of black-hat SEO wizard. In fact, I had never done any SEO before I got to Playdom. I had just heard about it and thought it was worth a shot.
I was lucky enough to hit on a process that took me from literally knowing zero about SEO to implementing changes that made us hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Here’s how I did it.
Tools of the Trade
After reading Moz’s Beginners Guide to SEO, I implemented their software on our site. It made the audit process ridiculously easy by giving grades to all of the areas of the site Google cares about and giving us tips on how to improve.
It also helped me benchmark our traffic for certain keywords, both against ourselves over time and against competitors, so I could prove that what I was doing worked.
If you’ve never used Moz, I highly recommend it. It cost us less than $100/month, and was a profitable expense after month one.
Make It Work
After I had targeted some areas of our site for improvement, I set up an Excel spreadsheet to help our devs add or change the metadata on all of our pages. It looked like this.
This was not the fanciest SEO template in the world. But who cared? This wasn’t about making our SEO perfect — it was about making it work.
And it did.
Results
In 2 months, we saw a 35% boost in traffic. Over 6 months, that increased to a 65% bump over the original benchmark. Time spent:
- Me: ~10 hours
- Dev team: ~4 hours
Not a bad investment of our time.
Take-aways
There are tons of marketing experts out there who are very deeply into advanced SEO tactics, and good for them. But you can actually get very far in SEO with a tiny investment of time and money.
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