6 Most Affordable SEO Services for Small Business in 2026

Nowadays, when people have a question or a problem, they typically look at search engines for answers and solutions.

Search engines, such as Google, Bing, or even YouTube, use extremely powerful algorithms to make sure the highest quality webpages appear at the top of search results – thus providing the best experience possible for their users.

On any given SERP (Search Engine Results Page), the top three results receive the majority of clicks.

The links at the bottom of the page receive roughly 2% of the total clicks.

As far as results on the second page and beyond go – those might as well not exist at all (LOL).

By implementing the best SEO practices, it can help your website rank higher in the SERPs – which then leads to more organic traffic being funneled to your website.

The more website visitors you get, the more opportunities you’ll have to get your brand in front of potential customers, which will ultimately help you drive more sales!

SEO is one of the best AND most affordable ways to increase your brand’s online visibility – especially if you’re working with a small marketing budget!

If you’re interested in other methods of increasing visibility, checkout one of these articles: 20 FREE Ways to Drive More Website Traffic or How to Effortlessly Increase Sales With SEO!

Aside from time and mental energy, you’ll need little to no resources to implement the advice given in this article.

If you’re looking to speed up the process – feel free to check out our affordable SEO services!

The process of optimizing individual webpages, for the sake of improving their search rankings, is known as on-page SEO.

A critical element of on-page SEO is the keywords you choose to target.

For more help here, checkout Brafton’s complete keyword optimization guide!

Properly Format Your Webpage Copy & Include Keywords in Your Title Tags

Yes, these algorithms are EXTREMELY powerful.

But if you don’t properly format your webpage copy, they can’t decipher your text at the level they’re capable of!

To help Google best understand the purpose of your webpage, make sure all pages include only ONE H1 title tag (heading).

A good example of an H1 heading would be the title of this blog post.

You can then use H2-H6 tags to create subheadings.

For instance, this paragraph is placed directly under an H3 title tag.

Do your best to include one target keyword in each of your title tags.

Additionally, your body text should include one keyword every 150-300 words, but DO NOT force it!

These keywords should happen naturally when writing about the subject at hand.

Well-structured and highly effective web design isn’t strictly for robots and algorithms.

These webpages will also do a much better job of keeping your website visitors engaged with the content on the page!

Optimize Your URLs

Every page on your website needs to have a properly formatted URL.

The URL is essentially the unique ID that search engines use to recognize your webpage!

Your URLs should be short and sweet – and also include one relevant keyword that you’re looking to target.

Add Images & Alt Text

In addition to benefiting your SEO strategy, images also break up your copy and give readers something else to look at besides a ton of words!

Properly optimized images should be:

• Compressed to a small file size
• Formatted as a PNG or JPEG
• Named with keywords
  • For example, if you’re trying to target the keyword “best racecar”, you might name an image of a racecar something like “best-racecar-green.jpg”

Also, you should make sure to include alt text within each image.

In the event the image is unavailable for the user, or they’re using a screen reader, the web browser will display the alt text instead!

Implement Internal & External Links

Every webpage on your site should have a few links to related pages within your site and also to relevant pages on other credible websites.

It’s CRITICAL that you link to trustworthy sources with content that isn’t only relevant, but highly valuable as well.

For instance, it’s better to link to a well-respected news source than a random blogger on the internet.

When designing a path for your readers to follow, it becomes clear why internal linking is essential.

Consider where you’d like to send your readers after they’ve finished reading the content on your webpage – those are the internal links you need to include!

When attempting to build trust with consumers and guide them to your website, there are many actions that you should take outside of your actual site itself.

These actions are more commonly referred to as off-page SEO.

Ask Customers for Reviews & Ratings to Build Credibility

If you’re trying to show potential customers that your brand is deserving of their trust, off-page SEO is incredibly useful.

Public ratings and reviews show potential customers that other people have already had a great experience in working with your business, consuming your products, or using your services!

In certain instances, product ratings and reviews will show up directly on the SERPs.

Additionally, these ratings and reviews will show up on third-party ecommerce websites such as Amazon, Alibaba, and some of your brand’s social media channels.

For these reasons, you should really make an effort to go above and beyond in your efforts to build up your brand’s ratings and reviews.

If you believe a customer had a great experience, make sure you ask them to take 30 seconds to leave a review of their experience!

If you believe a customer had an unbelievable experience with your company, ask them for the MOST POWERFUL (and my favorite) review of all… a video testimonial!

Choose One or Two Social Platforms to Use

Because it’s able to quickly drive relevant consumers to your website, social media marketing is becoming a CRITICAL component of off-page SEO, even it’s not technically considered a direct ranking factor.

It’s effectively another form of link building.

Also, brand mentions on social media can help your company get noticed by consumers who may have never encountered you otherwise.

Your efforts should be focused on building a community around your company’s brand – it’s important to remember this when creating your social media strategy.

With this in mind, there should always be a natural give and take between your posts and your followers.

If you strictly post links to your product pages, your followers will quickly get bored, annoyed, and even worse… unfollow your brand altogether!

Understand Link-Building Strategies

When another website links to your website, search engine algorithms receive a signal that your site contains valuable information.

For instance, if you write a blog about how to bake the perfect cake and a ton of other baking website link back to your article, your site’s search rankings will begin to improve.

By sharing your content on your social media accounts, you’ll be able to quickly build up the amount of websites linking back to your webpages.

Google STRONGLY encourages you to build “natural links” – these are links that haven’t been paid for or solicited with spam messaging.

Unnatural links will actually harm your SEO efforts.

The best way to get natural links is to continuously publish great content that has high value!

Reach Out to Industry-Relevant Influencers

If you’re strictly looking to increase your brand’s content reach and level of engagement, social media influencers can be extremely useful.

Social media influencers have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of followers who are actively waiting to hear their opinions and discuss topics they present.

Because of this, you can quickly place your brand at the center of an extremely attentive audience.

Developing a strategy for influencer marketing can be difficult and complex, even if it may seem simple on the surface.

To help you out, here’s SproutSocial’s guide on how to develop an influencer marketing strategy!

If you’re looking to promote your products and services to potential customers in your area who are looking for any of your services, local SEO is a great tool to utilize.

For more information on this, feel free to checkout our Local SEO Services!

Below, we’ve included a few major tips to help in your own local SEO efforts!

Add Structured Location Data (aka Schema Markup) to Your Website

If you’re on Google and search the name of your favorite barbecue restaurant, on the right side of your computer screen you’ll probably see a big information card with a picture of the restaurant, their ratings, and other useful information.

How do you think Google knows all this information about the restaurant?

If you guessed “magic”, you guessed wrong!

The real answer is Structured Data, commonly referred to as Schema Markup.

Structured data is a coding language that can easily be understood and interpreted by search engine crawlers.

If your business doesn’t have an in-house website developer, Google offers a free tool that will help you add Schema Markup to your website!

Optimize Your Google My Business Listing

Another highly effective method of ensuring that your company shows up on SERPs is to complete your Google My Business profile.

In addition to showing you analytics that help you better monitor your brand engagement, your Google My Business (GMB) profile also makes it substantially easier for potential customers to find and connect with your brand!

Make It Simple for Customers to Contact You

Local search engine algorithms give internet surfers only the most relevant results based on ratings, credibility, and geographic location.

For example, people in Chicago, IL searching for  ‘garage repair’ will get different results than somebody searching for the same thing in Los Angeles, CA.

As a best practice, you NEED to have a page on your website that includes your business’ contact information – this allows potential customers to find and contact your business in real time.

You can even include your business’ physical address if you’d like an additional SEO boost!

Conduct A Site Audit to Check Your Mobile Usability

According to recent studies conducted on all Google searches done in 2018, roughly 82% of shoppers using a smartphone included the term ‘near me’ at the end of their search term.

For instance, this means they’re searching for terms such as ‘snow removal near me’ rather than a similar term such as ‘snow removal Chicago, IL.’

These people (shoppers) are searching for information on local businesses, products, and services.

If you’d like to look at how your website’s mobile accessibility currently stacks up, Google (shockingly) offers another free tool for viewing exactly that: Think with Google – check it out!

In efforts to improve the visibility of their brand’s product pages on ecommerce search engines like Google, Amazon, Alibaba, and others – digital storefronts leverage specific SEO techniques.

Conduct A Site Audit to Check Your Mobile Usability

Ecommerce websites typically have substantially more webpages compared to most other business websites, such as a restaurant or shoe repair company.

Because of this, an ecommerce website’s organization is CRITICAL for the user experience.

To ensure that your website visitors don’t get lost in a labyrinth of product pages, you need to have good site architecture.

As a rule of thumb, you want to keep every webpage on your site within 3 clicks of your homepage.

For instance, to find a certain winter coat on a clothing website, a visitor might first click on the women’s section, then outerwear, then a specific winter coat!

Create High-Value Content Based On Your Audience’s Needs

When building content for ecommerce brands, it’s important to focus on creating pieces that not only funnel visitors to your website, but also provide visitors with high value before they ever make a purchase.

An example would be a clothing brand publishing an article on how to match a belt with your shoes.

Informative content, like the example given above, can help your website rank for more keywords that are relevant to your brand.

It also provides you with more content to publish on your social media accounts!

The best brands in the world make it their goal to become a credible source for product knowledge, rather than just an online clothing rack like so many other sites are!

Optimize Your Product Listings for Amazon and Google

Of all options available, which 2 search engines do you think are used the most by the vast majority of online shoppers?

You guessed it – Amazon and Google!

Here’s the harsh reality – if your products don’t appear on these search engines… the world probably doesn’t even know they exist.

That’s why it’s CRUCIAL that you implement product SEO to improve your products’ online visibility!

Here’s a few high-impact tips for product SEO:

• Always use clear, high-resolution photos of your products
• Include bulleted lists in your product descriptions
• Incorporate long-tail keywords in the titles and descriptions of your products

To help search engine bots crawl your website in the most efficient way possible, you need to incorporate Technical SEO on your website.

In addition to helping the search engines crawl your site better, technical optimizations will help your webpages load quicker, especially on mobile devices!

Review Canonical URLs

If you have multiple pages on your website that have the same or similar content, your entire website could be penalized by Google and other search engines.

To avoid these penalties, it’s very important that you use Canonical URL tags!

Here’s a quick example of how you’d implement this with your site.

Let’s say you have 2 webpages with content that is almost identical.

You need to pick the page you believe is more important and make that the canonical version.

Then you need to add a canonical tag on the other page with a link to the page you selected as being more important.

Create Your 404 Page

If your website’s architecture is designed well, it should prevent any visitors from getting lost when on your site.

However, you NEED to have a backup plan in place in the event that somebody does get lost – this backup plan is your 404 page.

A well-designed 404 page will help any lost website patrons find the place they want to go.

The best method of doing this is to include links back to your homepage, your sitemap, or an internal search bar!

Register Your Website with Google Search Console

Depending on your website’s current condition, there could be TONS of little tweaks you could make that would drastically improve your website’s speed and overall usability.

Instead of playing a guessing game as to what needs improvement, Google Search Console will tell you exactly what to adjust!

As soon as you register with Google Search Console, you’ll have access to full, comprehensible reports of:

• Which webpages are currently being indexed by Google;
• Which pages are already perfect; and
• Which pages have any errors or red flags!

By the time next year rolls around, it’s anticipated that video content will be accountable for 82% of all web traffic.

Potential customers will have a much easier time discovering your video content if you implement the video SEO tactics discussed below.

Choose High-Quality Thumbnail Images

Pay very close attention to your video thumbnails if you’re looking to improve the click-through rate of your videos.

Because your thumbnails are clumped in with hundreds of others, it’s important to use vibrant colors and bold text to help them stand out in the crowd.

However, you should also remember to use 2 to 3 words on your thumbnail, at the very most!

Customize Your YouTube Channel

YouTube content creation is an EXTREMELY effective method for driving more traffic to your website.

Your YouTube channel MUST align with the look and feel of your brand’s other pages.

This means using consistent colors across all channels and keeping your message the same – this will help create the most unified experience possible!

Add SEO Optimized Descriptions and Tags to Your Videos

Compared to SEO strategies used with written content, video SEO strategies are a bit more elementary.

In short, search engine crawlers simply aren’t advanced enough yet to understand exactly what’s going on in any given video.

While we’re currently in the early implementation stages of artificial intelligence powered image recognition software solutions (bots that can understand videos), there is still a significant amount of testing and development that must be done before this ever effects your video SEO strategy.

In the meantime, you can tell search engine crawlers, on sites like YouTube, what your video is all about by adding keywords to your video titles, descriptions, and tags!

For over 20 years now, online marketers have been practicing SEO – and some of the lingo associated with SEO is certainly starting to show its age.

Simply put, the term ‘white hat’ refers to the heroes in the classic Western movies because they would typically wear a white cowboy hat.

Whereas, the term ‘black hat’ refers to the villain because they would almost always be donning a black gambler’s hat.

White hat equals good – black hat equals bad!

Back in the Wild Wild West of SEO, black hat SEOs would use tricks that blatantly violated the rules of search engine.

One of the most common tricks they’d use was in adding paragraphs of invisible text to their web pages.

Because humans weren’t able to see these paragraphs, it had absolutely no effect on their user experience.

However, because these pages were LOADED with keywords, they would skyrocket up the rankings for a ton of different SERPs.

Fortunately, Google and the other search engines have developed substantially more sophisticated algorithms over the past 20 years.

Nowadays, even in the short term, black hat SEO tactics don’t really work anymore.

Even if they do work in the short term, Google will penalize or ban your site altogether once they finally catch on!

Everything we’ve covered in this article is a white hat SEO tactic.

As white hat SEO specialists, our goal is to rank websites highly, the right way, by following Google’s rules and terms of service.

There are many benefits that come with hiring an SEO agency or SEO specialist.

For starters, SEO experts are always aware of the most current Google updates and SEO best practice because they LIVE and BREATHE online marketing.

SEO experts are also able to spend a large portion of their time on wholesome strategies that will help tie all the pieces of your online marketing strategy together into a single, unified plan!

When you’re looking to hire an SEO specialist for your business, look for professionals who:

• Have a proven track record with great results: You can ask them for a client referral if they have one or any case studies they’ve conducted. This will help you learn more about their true capabilities.
• Are always up-to-date with the current best practices for SEO: You can ask them about the recent challenges they’ve had to overcome with recent changes in Google’s search engine algorithm.
• Use data to make the most informed decisions possible: Intuition has its perks, but the best SEO specialists in the world look at data and analytics to tweak their strategies. You can ask them what tools they use to analyze how their current strategies are working and identify areas for improvement.
• Have experience in creative writing and/or content creation: Most SEO techniques are leveraged strictly to appeal to Google’s algorithms and improve search rankings. But people often forget about how these tactics can effect the experience for the people visiting your website. You can ask them for examples of content they’ve produced to identify if they actually know how to appeal to consumers or not.

It’s important to keep in mind that SEO is a long-term strategy.

It’s normal not to see results right away. You need to allow enough time for Google’s search engine bots to crawl, read, and index all new webpages.

Typically, people begin seeing significant results from their SEO strategy after about 3 months or so.

Keep optimizing your webpages and implementing these affordable SEO services for your small business – the results should follow!

If you’re interested in other ways to drive more traffic to your website, you’ll likely find some value in these posts:

• 20 FREE Ways to Drive More Website Traffic
• How to Effortlessly Increase Sales With SEO

Hope this article helps you out! If you want more advice for expanding your reach, getting leads, & growing your business – let me know in the comment section below!

If you’d like help implementing any of these tactics into your business – checkout our affordable seo services and web design services – or simply drop us a line!

We’d love if you left a comment/question for us to answer below!

Which of these affordable SEO services are you planning to implement on your business’ website this year?