How to Grow your Blog with Surfer Grow Flow

SEO is not cheap anymore.

Acquiring quality backlinks costs money, time, or effort. Creating high-quality content costs money, time, or effort. Hiring an SEO specialist and a content creator - costs money as well as time and effort for onboarding.

According to WebFX, the average cost of SEO for small companies ranges from $750 to $2000.

What if we told you that you can have your own SEO machine for less than $100?

Or even for free?

What do you need in order to grow your website?

John Mueller had a clear answer to this question.

According to Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land there arethree main ranking factors in Google:

Content.
Links.
RankBrain.

Each one of them has multiple subfactors. We can risk a statement, that no one working outside of Google knows all of them. And after the implementations of RankBrain, even Google employees don’t know every single one of them.

How to fight an enemy that you don’t know?

In this respect, SEO resembles real life. In life, you do not have to know much about economics or law to be a good citizen. You have to work hard, take care of your family, be diligent, be kind to other people, and avoid conflict.

There are some best practices in SEO too. Let’s go over them.

Take care of the basic Search Engine Optimization

SEO is not quantum physics. Michał Suski, Surfer's CPO, says that SEO has a very low entry threshold. There are so many changes in the SEO industry that practices that were available 3 years ago are now outdated and irrelevant. The vast majority of websites do well with a DIY SEO.

How? Let’s talk about it.

Set up Google Search Console and Google Analytics

Google Search Console is essential here as it shows you precise data about your visibility.

Besides, many tools like Ahrefs, Semrush or SurferSEO provide you with additional features and suggestions once you grant them access to your GSC.

To set it up, you need to verify the ownership of your domain. You can do it by adding a TXT or CNAME DNS record. It’s not hard, but it takes some knowledge to pull it off.

Caution! If you’re not comfortable with your website’s database, ask someone to do it for you.

Google Analytics is a tool that tells you more about the traffic on your website:

How many people come to your website,
who they are,
where are they coming from - organic? Social media? ads?
how long they stay,
what content they like and do not like.

Peter Drucker said: “You can’t improve what you don’t measure”. These tools are the core of your website analytics.

Run a free audit

There are a few SEO tools that will give you some valuable suggestions:

UberSuggest,
SEOptimer,
SEOmator,
WooRank,
Serpstat,
Seobility,
Screaming Frog.

These tools have limited functionalities, but it should help you create your DIY SEO strategy. These tools will find:

404 pages,
pages with low word count,
duplicate or missing titles, meta description, H1,
images without alt tag.

And many more.

Check the mobile version of your website

According to data from statista.com, more than 60% of traffic in Google and other search engines comes from mobile users. WebFX says that 40% of online transactions happen on mobile devices.

The easiest way to check the mobile version is to simply view it on your phone. Is it easy to use? Is everything clearly laid out? Does it load quickly? Are there elements that are off- screen or misplaced?

The next thing you can do is to run a test with Google’s tool:

You can also use some best mobile SEO practices:

check the site speed in Page Speed Insights, Pingdom, or GTmetrix,
keep your website light, avoid heavy files like GIFs or video,
rescale and compress images,
use next generation image formats like .webp or .avif,
have at least 20px font,
be careful with pop-ups,
make sure both the desktop and mobile versions of the website are the same.

Prepare a content plan with proper keyword research

First off, you have to identify your target audience.

Second off, identify your primary keyword. You will use it to create the initial seed keyword list.

Knowing when and what to do is important for several reasons:

Better workflow - you no longer have to wonder, "What do I do next?",
Bottleneck detection - the moment you notice that the release has been released past the deadline, you know you have a bottleneck. Now it's just a matter of finding it and fixing it,
Better KPI analysis - You know if you are ahead of schedule or behind, and if you are behind, you can try to fix it,
Maintaining consistency - Google likes fresh content; a well thought out content plan can help you maintain that, Budget planning - if you know how much content you need, you can quantify exactly how many resources you need to spend.

You can prepare your content plan yourself, simply by covering the topics regarding your product and answering the questions of your potential clients.

Or you can use tools like our Keyword Research Tool or other free keyword research tool.

Create high quality content

Now that you have your content plan, it is time to create a killer content for your target keywords.

With Google’s Helpful Content Update rolling out, you can’t afford to slack when it comes to creating content.

How to make sure your content is of a high quality? Here are a few tips:

determine the user's search intent and make sure you publish relevant content that matches the search intent,
pay attention to formatting and structure,
avoid fluff,
write catchy title tags and meta descriptions,
make sure the topic is exhausted, but do not drag out the article,
make sure the keyword density is high and avoid keyword stuffing.

Content comes with a cost. A highly qualified content specialist will charge a lot. Someone less qualified will cost you less, but you’ll need to invest your time training them and refining the piece.

How to tell if your content is of a high quality? Well, SurferSEO Content Score is one of the metrics you can use.

High quality content will not only fight for high position in search engine results pages and satisfy your prospects, but it will also make up for a good base for link building.

Build your topical authority by managing internal links and creating topical silos

In the article on How To Use Topic Clusters, Michał Suski says how important internal linking is for search engines and for your website.

Google needs to know you are an expert in your niche. You can do it by:

publishing high quality content,
acquiring links from relevant websites,
linking relevant pages internally.

Topic clusters revolve around the last point - internal linking. With a good internal linking structure, you are basically telling Google what is what and which pages are more important than others. You should link relevant pages within your domain to tell Google that they cover relevant topics.

Internal linking will also help you create pillar pages - pages that have strategic value for your business.

What is the biggest SEO struggle of small companies?

As you can see, there is a lot to do if you want to do SEO yourself.

The rules are simple: if you do not want to pay with money, pay with time.

This is especially true for bootstrapped startups that want to do most of the work themselves and save as much money as possible.

But what if you have no money and no time?

The first expenses to be cut in a crisis are those for marketing. You have to pay the bills and salaries. Ads and SEO come next.

However, Airbnb CEO said:

"What the pandemic showed is that we can take marketing down to zero and still have 95% of the same traffic as the year before. We’re not going to forget that lesson."

So, in essence, can you afford to neglect SEO? Not really.

How then can you take care of your SEO without paying hundreds of dollars and spending the rest of your life learning?

Easy - with Grow Flow.

How will Grow Flow help you grow your website?

Grow Flow is a tool designed to take care of the website’s search engine optimization without much effort. It is an answer to many solopreneurs and small business owners SEO needs.

You connect your domain to Grow Flow using Google Search Console integration, and let it do the heavy lifting. Grow Flow will provide you with just a few tasks a week. Fulfilling them will boost your organic traffic.

A compelling content plan in no time

You need many blog posts to fight for high positions in Google search results. You may find yourself thinking: “What should I do next?”.

This is a thing of the past, because Grow Flow analyzes your domain, your competitors and gives you suggestions on relevant keywords to write about next.

Manage low-hanging fruits easily

As Michał Suski said in his guest appearance at Hostinger Academy, some pages rank for keywords they don’t even contain. You can have great results simply by adding them.

All you need to do it is your Google Search Console.

Take your GSC Visibility report
Sort queries by the number of impressions.
Take pages with lots of impressions and not that many clicks.
Take queries that these pages are ranking for and check, if your page content contains them.
If not, add them.

And Grow Flow can do all of that for you, giving you a simple instruction: “Take this keyword and put it here”.

Take care of your internal linking

Internal links are crucial for the website’s structure. They:

improve the overall user’s experience,
lower the bounce rate,
improve the indexing speed,
spread link juice,
improve visibility in search results (by sitelinks),
help crawlers interpet your website,
limit keyword cannibalisation.

SEO’s know how tedious the task can be.

Some people are using programming to find relevant pages.

And some people are using Grow Flow.

Quality backlinks in Grow Flow

How will you know where to look for quality backlinks, and what are those?

You can spend hours on outreach marketing, networking, building relationships and trying to acquire. You can spend just as much time finding out what your competitors are doing.

Or you can wait for Grow Flow’s suggestions.

Thanks to integration with Semrush, one of the biggest SEO tools in the world, we have access to backlinks that your competition acquired recently.

Grow Flow will save you time

Google's search engine optimization guidelines are a 167-page document. In the last 20 years, there have been more than 20 core updates to Google's algorithm, with dozens of smaller updates throughout each year.

But you do not need to read it. We already did it when preparing Grow Flow and other SurferSEO modules. It's our job to do the homework and save you time.

The same goes for internal linking. Finding topically related websites within your domain and linking them together takes hours, especially with a huge website.

Grow Flow does it for you.

It gives you precise instructions: “Link this to that”.

That’s it.

Grow Flow will save you money

Time is money, no questions about it.

Now that you have your virtual SEO assistant, you can focus on what’s really important for you, which is managing your business.

Now that you have your virtual SEO assistant, you can focus on what's really important to you, running your business.

As we mentioned earlier, businesses spend between $750 and $2000 a month on SEO.

With Grow Flow, you can save a large portion of that amount.

You can implement the guidelines yourself or hire someone at a junior level to do it for you. Grow Flow's tasks are so clear and simple that even someone with no SEO background can do them.

Focus on what’s important

SEO is a never-ending job.

First, you need to catch up with your competition.

Then, you need to beat them.

And finally - you need to stay on top.

Like it or not, your day only lasts 24 hours. How to select priorities? Which links should you acquire first? Which articles are more important to write or optimize?

Grow Flow uses the 80/20 rule, choosing 20% of tasks that will bring 80% of results.

Summary - what can Grow Flow do for you?

Grow Flow will:

perform a keyword research and make suggestions for future articles,
find content gap,
find low-hanging fruits,
bring you 80% of results by selecting 20% of the most impactful tasks,
analyze competitors backlinks,
pinpoint internal linking opportunities.

Your competitors seeing holes in your SEO strategy