An easy guide on how to optimize your website for free
The key to success in the “great SEO game” is how well you optimize your site. Even if your product or service is brilliant, you’ll have a hard time making money if no one can find it.
Using this guide, you will learn how to optimize your website without using paid tools, services, or products.
Why Should You Want To Optimize Your Website?
Optimizing your website for search engines should be your first concern when working on improving your website. The goal of every website is to rank well, drive traffic, generate conversions, and help us make more money. That’s the dream, isn’t it? A properly optimized website is the first step to that dream.
It was simpler times a couple of decades ago when anyone could buy a domain, make a website, and expect to get traffic. Now, we all know the internet is saturated with competition in pretty much any niche.
Because of this, you must be more strategic about what type of site you build, what niche you enter, and how you will stand out within that niche. It’s important to optimize your site to ensure Google’s SERP algorithm shares your site with relevant users in preference to any of your competitors.
See How Digital Papercuts Can Drive Massive Amounts of Traffic to Your Website
- Get a massive amount of search engine traffic with SEO. Get real results.
- In order to create content that will be shared, picked up by links, and attract traffic, our team creates epic content or you can use our Content Ninja software to create your own content.
- PPC Advertising – effective paid advertising strategies with clear ROI.
Is It Really Possible to Optimize Your Website for Free?
Many marketing decisions can be costly. Fortunately, SEO isn’t.
Through simple methods like creating content, using alt text, and researching keywords, you can get started quickly. Regardless of your budget, you need to devote time and attention to your website optimization. Don’t forget that everyone starts somewhere, and you can easily optimize your website for free if you’re thrifty enough.
Developing a solid understanding of technical SEO is the first step.
It’s okay if you’re starting from scratch. Free resources can be found on the web in a number of forms, including YouTube videos, free online courses, and endless information from myself and other industry experts. It’s all there, you just have to put it together in a way that makes sense for you.
Step By Step Website Optimization Of Your Website for Free
In order to help you learn how to optimize your website for search engines, I’ll walk you through the steps needed to achieve a high ranking. If you are willing to do the work yourself, these methods are free and will yield the same results as those who have deep pockets.
1. Keyword Research
The best on-site optimization always begins with keyword research. Keyword research involves finding words and phrases that are both relevant to your niche and also highly searched on Google.
Find keywords that a lot of people are searching for and also don’t have a lot of competition. This takes a lot of digging. Don’t even bother trying to do this without a tool on your own; it’s practically impossible.
Ubersuggest (a free keyword research tool) is designed for beginners with a low budget. It’s possible to discover what keywords your competitors are already ranking for based on your niche, and you can use those phrases in your blog or on your site.
Moreover, Ubersuggest provides you with a list of keywords that would be a good choice for you to use on your website based on the input of keyword ideas.
You’ll start ranking higher on Google for certain phrases as you accumulate relevant and useful keywords on your website. As a result, your web pages are visited more frequently, and your conversion rates are increased.
What’s the reason? SEO content aims to attract attention, and a well-written copy provides value and solves common problems, encouraging people to buy. Additionally, you can use the free Chrome extension to see keyword volumes and related keywords when conducting your Google searches.
2. How To Create Simple Site Navigation
Site architecture is another critical step in optimizing your website, but it can be difficult to understand. If people can’t easily navigate through your site, it won’t matter how great your keywords are or how amazing your offer is, as they’ll soon click away.
Before your site is even created, you should have an idea of how you want it to look. Plan out the information, determine where it should be placed, what its purpose is, and ultimately where you plan on having people go.
Keeping the site layout simple allows prospective customers to navigate the site easily without clicking through too many pages. If you can accomplish the same result with only a few pages, don’t overcomplicate your website. It will take more time and money to make your website and you won’t be able to stick to a low budget.
Below are a few reasons why a basic website is a good idea.
- Cost-effective: Anyone with a decent understanding of technology can create a one-page website on a site like WordPress, or Groove.cm.
- Easy to crawl: You’ll hear the term crawling a lot in the web space, and it refers to Google’s ability to read your site and find out what it does. Google indexes your pages based on your keywords. The more pages you have, the more difficult it is for Google to understand your goals and provide your products to their audience.
- Speed: Page speed plays a huge role in Google ranking and user retention. The more complex the elements on the site, the longer it will take to load and the higher the bounce rate. It is one of the reasons we love GroovePages because they have these steps elements optimized for speed.
3. How To Create Landing Pages
Every website needs a place for users to land. Your social media profiles can drive traffic to your website, but if you want to sell to them or introduce them to your offer, you’ll need a landing page they can click over to. You should use the same verbiage, colors, and selling points on your landing page as you do on social media.
Landing pages are a great alternative to detailed websites. With tools like GrooveFunnels and ClickFunnels, more and more people can reach high-intent customers. A landing page is easy to use, easy to optimize, and a reasonable option for people on a tight budget. You’ll have to shop around for some tools though, since some aren’t free.
4. How To Optimize Your Website for Mobile Usage
As more and more people around the world use their smartphones on a daily basis, it’s crucial that websites are mobile-optimized (and functional). You need to consider how users will access your website and factor that into the design and layout which can be complex if you don’t have experience building websites.
Many of the budget-friendly web hosts offer mobile optimization as part of their service. Your website should not have anything cut off on the sides, all the buttons should work, and all the links should work, and everything should be readable on both computers and smartphones. If you haven’t visited your website from your mobile phone for some time, double-check everything is working now (and fix anything that needs to be changed).
5. Check Your Website Speed
PageSpeed Insights is a free tool provided by Google. It will tell you how fast your page loads by searching your URL.
There is diagnostic information provided below the results to explain the rating. An example would be too much third-party code and a long cache (which can be easily fixed).
You can use this tool to see how quickly your website loads and what improvements you can make. In general, the faster, the better. Google will now use loading times as a ranking factor when determining a website’s user-friendliness.
Free Resources to Optimize Your Website
Previously, we discussed some of the resources you can use to optimize your website, but now we’ll get more specific. You can start using these free tools right away.
1. How To Learn SEO in 5 Minutes
There are many free resources on the internet, and all you need to do is look for them. In five minutes or less, you can understand SEO basics if you engage your mind and work through the steps independently.
2. See What Your Competitors Are Doing
Check out your competitors’ websites for ideas about how they’re optimizing their sites free of charge. If you have an e-commerce store and you are having trouble getting traction, you might consider: checking out some other stores that are in the same niche.
See the blog posts, products pages, images, headers, titles, landing pages, and so on. As you observe these factors, take note of elements that work for them (such as posts with high comment engagement) and start implementing them on your site. Try new things and see what works.
3. YouTube
Anyone interested in learning SEO should check out YouTube. In 30 minutes a day, you can become highly knowledgeable about SEO even if you don’t know anything about it.
No matter which channel you use, there are always people who are experts at enhancing search engine optimization. By watching the videos and gradually implementing the tips, you’ll be able to grow your site more quickly.
We have a number of videos on our channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTbCWyhnJyIdj666OLAfRtw
4. Google Search Console
By linking your website with Google Search Console, you will get access to tons of free resources that will tell you a lot about your website’s performance. In addition, you can see the performance of each page and the page loading speed.
Additionally, all the data you receive in the search console is verifiably accurate since it comes directly from the source.
5. Free Ubersuggest
Due to how important keyword tools are to SEO optimization, I want to mention Ubersuggest again. There are other tools available, but Ubersuggest is an easy-to-use, user-friendly solution for small businesses. Using it will guide you in the right direction for your on-page SEO and help you make better decisions for your site.
If you don’t use the right keywords in your content, your time and effort will be wasted. Keywords help Google’s algorithm understand what your site is about and how it relates to the people searching for you.
Google won’t be able to figure out the purpose of your website if there aren’t a lot of relevant keywords on your site. Ubersuggest helps you find low competition keywords to target.
Optimize Your Website for Free Frequently Asked Questions
The following are some of the most frequently asked questions about optimizing your website for free.
Can SEO Be Done for Free?
SEO can be done for free with a variety of free tools and learning resources from YouTube and blogs. It just takes some work!
How Do I Optimize My Website Without Paying For SEO?
Even though you have to do everything manually, you can optimize your website for free. You can do keyword research with tools like Ubersuggest research for free and the Google Search Console offer insight into technical SEO changes you may need to make.
What Are Some Tips for Optimizing Your Website?
Consider the reader’s intent instead of pulling every single keyword from your research tool. Since Google is getting smarter and better at putting the pieces together, user intent is more important than ever. The first step in creating a successful website is to create great content, provide value, and make it easy for visitors to find. We also have a number of excellent agency resources if you need help.
What Are Some Free SEO Tools?
Ubersuggest, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Keyword Hero, Google Trends, and AnswerThePublic are among the best free SEO tools.
