Marketing on a Budget? Don’t Cut SEO Out

If your marketing budget has taken a hit and is trimmed down, you may be considering cutting out some elements you think can be put on hold.

If the SEO content budget is on the chopping board, you might want to reconsider. Here is why:

Why You Lose Momentum if You Cut Out SEO

As you’ve probably noticed in the past, it takes time for SEO to build up your business. Search Engine Optimization is a long-term process and you can’t just freeze it along with your current rankings.

When you cut SEO from your budget, you can undo all those months of hard work. Think of SEO as a long string that loses all of its strength when cut in the middle. Once you decide to resume your efforts after a months-long break, it takes another several months to get you back to your rightful place on the Search Engine Results Page.

Unlike PPC and other paid ads, SEO and content don’t work well if your finger is on the On/Off power button. You can pause Google Search campaigns for weeks or even months and still get similar results after relaunch.

SEO on a Budget: Sustaining Small SEO Efforts

There are some ways to pare down your SEO budget without cutting it out completely. As you can see, you should never eliminate it as a whole for any length of time.

A good alternative is to refresh and revamp the content you already have. It is a great way to get new traffic from the SEO and content work you’ve already invested in.

This is a very useful tactic, and you can read more about it in our article on how to grow traffic when content resources are scarce. Focus your limited resources on content optimization. Its main goal is to keep your content new and up to date and to make sure it aligns with the search intent (check out this search intent checklist, it’s very useful).

Other tactics you can use are changing the structure of your articles and the wording in your H1s and H2s. If you’re not familiar with the process, you can read our detailed guide on optimizing your existing content. You can also use your internal link structure to boost money-making pages and help them rank better organically.

If you were considering whether to cut off your SEO & Content budget or not, you’re probably wondering how effective content marketing really is. We’ve got an answer – continue reading Is Content Still King.