You have a website, no money, and a browser tab full of people telling you to buy a $99-a-month keyword tool. One says start with technical SEO. One says content is king. A third has posted a 40-item audit checklist. None of it tells you what to do on Tuesday morning.

Here is the answer. Starting SEO with no budget works when you stop doing a little of everything and instead do a small number of things that are free, permanent and high-leverage, in a strict order, ignoring everything the industry sells until those are finished. Most items below are one afternoon each, and all of them stay done. The order matters more than the items, because several are useless before the ones above them. Doing step six first is the usual way a beginner wastes six months.

1. Set up the free tools that give you sight.
2. Fix indexing, before anything else.
3. Claim the free business surfaces.
4. Pick targets from data you already have.
5. Fix the pages you already have.
6. Write the few pages a business genuinely needs.
7. Do the technical basics that matter at your size.
8. Earn links and reputation the slow free way.

1. Get sight: Search Console, analytics, Bing

Search Console, verified as a Domain property if you can. Google’s reason for preferring it: domain properties “include data for all protocol (http/https) and subdomain variations of your property.” A URL-prefix property quietly misses your http version, your www version or your blog subdomain, and then you spend a week wondering where half your pages went. It needs DNS verification, one TXT record at whoever sold you the domain; the other methods (HTML file, meta tag, Analytics, Tag Manager) cover URL-prefix properties only.

Submit a sitemap, with low expectations. Nearly every CMS generates one; paste the URL into the Sitemaps report. Then note what Google calls it: “submitting a sitemap is merely a hint: it doesn’t guarantee that Google will download the sitemap or use the sitemap for crawling URLs on the site.” Google even says you may not need one if your site is “about 500 pages or fewer” and well linked internally. Do it for the free indexing count, not as a fix for an indexing problem.

What the Performance report means. Clicks are “the number of times a user clicked your site from Google Search results”, impressions “how many times your site appeared in Search results”, and average position “the average position of the topmost result from your site”, meaning your best-ranking page averaged over every impression. Two limits: recent rows are provisional, since “the newest data can be preliminary, meaning it’s still being collected and might change in the next few hours”, and it only shows queries you already appear for. A mirror, not market research.

Analytics and Bing. GA4 is free: install it, mark the one event you care about as a conversion, then leave it alone for three months. Bing Webmaster Tools takes fifteen minutes, since you can import the verified site from Search Console, and gives independent crawl and query data plus free keyword data. Bing’s index also feeds Microsoft’s search and assistant products. Cheap rather than urgent.

2. Fix indexing before anything else

A page that is not indexed cannot rank for anything, at any budget. Beginner advice skips this, and it is the commonest reason a site gets no traffic at all. Open the Page Indexing report and see how many of your pages Google actually holds. It names a reason for every failure:

• “URL marked ‘noindex'”: usually WordPress’s “Discourage search engines” box left ticked after launch, a staging flag, or a plugin noindexing a whole post type. The best problem to find: one click can restore a section.
• “URL blocked by robots.txt”: open /robots.txt in a browser. A stray Disallow: / left over from development is common.
• “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” and “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user”: your pages look like the same page and Google picked one. Note the second, because Google says “indicating a canonical preference is a hint, not a rule”, and picks whichever page “is objectively the most complete and useful for search users.” Re-declaring your tag will not help. Make the page genuinely different, or merge it.
• “Crawled – currently not indexed”: Google fetched it and declined to keep it. No technical fix exists: the page is thin, near-identical to another, or offers a searcher nothing.
• “Discovered – currently not indexed”: Google knows the URL and has not fetched it. Usually a page nothing internal links to.

One trap: block a page in robots.txt and noindex it, and the noindex never takes effect. Google’s wording is unambiguous. “If the page is blocked by a robots.txt file or the crawler can’t access the page, the crawler will never see the noindex rule, and the page can still appear in search results.” Pick one mechanism, and leave anything you want de-indexed crawlable.

For a single page, use URL Inspection: it shows whether the URL is indexed, which canonical Google chose against the one you declared, and whether a live fetch works. Request indexing once for a genuinely new or fixed page; repeating it only feels productive.

3. Claim the free surfaces, especially if you are local

If your customers come from one town or region, this afternoon beats three months of writing. Google says creating a Business Profile is free, and that local results rank on relevance (“how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for”), distance (“how far each business is from the customer who’s searching”) and prominence. It also says “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.”

That is unusually good news for someone with no money. One of the three factors is your physical location, which nobody can outspend you on, and the other two move on actions Google itself lists: verify the business, complete the information, keep hours accurate including special hours, add photos and videos, encourage reviews, respond to reviews. In practice: a primary category describing what you are rather than what you also do, every service listed separately, real hours plus holiday exceptions, twenty photographs of actual work, and a review request built into the end of every job. A profile with forty real reviews and complete information beats a competitor’s blog archive for the searches that pay you.

Not local? Claim it for brand searches and move on, because there is no equivalent free lever for an online-only business.

4. Pick targets without a paid keyword tool

You have no difficulty score and you do not need one. Four free sources, best first.

Your own Search Console queries. The highest-return keyword research anyone can do, and the reason step one comes first. Sort by impressions and find queries where you sit between position five and twenty with plenty of impressions and almost no clicks. Google already thinks you are relevant there; the page is just not good enough or not titled right, and a page ranking eleventh is far closer to traffic than a page that does not exist.

Autocomplete and related searches. Google says autocomplete “predictions reflect real searches that have been done on Google”, shaped by the language of the query, the location it comes from, trending interest and your past searches, so use a private window. Type your service and stop. Type it with “cost”, “near me”, “vs”, “how long”. Work the alphabet a letter at a time, then read the related searches and People also ask boxes.

The questions customers actually email you. Search your sent folder for phrases you have typed repeatedly. Answered the same question fifteen times? That is a page, and you know it converts, because the askers were buyers.

Competitor page titles. Their title tags are their target list, published free. Open the six competitors you lose to and list their service page titles.

Now the part that replaces a difficulty score. Judge a query by searching it and reading the results page, not by a number.

• Page one is national retailers, Wikipedia and Amazon? Not your query. Walk away.
• A map pack on top? The work is your Business Profile, not a blog post.
• Forums and Reddit threads ranking? Google reads the query as wanting opinion and experience, so a polished sales page loses.
• Top results all pricing pages? Write a pricing page.
• Page one thin, old, or written by someone who has clearly never done the job? That is your opening, whatever a tool would have said.

5. Fix the pages you have before writing new ones

Take the ten pages with the most impressions. Improving those beats publishing anything new, because impressions are the hard part. Four edits, in order.

• Make the title match the query. Not your internal name for the service: the words the customer typed, which Search Console just handed you. A page called “Solutions” that ranks for “emergency drain unblocking Leeds” should be titled for what people search. Four minutes, and more short-term movement than anything else here.
• Answer the query in the first two sentences. The answer, the price band or the direct statement, then the explanation. Delete every “Welcome to our website”. An answer engine quoting your page takes the first clear sentence it finds.
• Add internal links from your strongest pages. Strongest means most impressions, which you now know. Link from those to the pages you want ranking, with descriptive anchor text rather than “click here”. The standard fix for anything stuck in “Discovered – currently not indexed”.
• Merge pages that compete with each other. Three thin pages on one service split their own signals and invite Google to pick a canonical you did not. Keep the best, move anything useful into it, 301 the rest. The only real fix for that duplicate-canonical status.

6. Write the few pages a business actually needs

Not a blog. Not a content calendar. A small, finished set, in this order.

One page per thing you sell. Each service or product category gets its own: what it is, who it suits, what happens step by step, what it costs, what goes wrong, photographs of your own work. Five services and one “Services” page means four pages missing, and those four are worth more than forty blog posts.

One page per genuine pre-purchase question. Genuine means a buyer asked it before handing over money. “How long does a bathroom refit take.” “Do you work with our accounting software.” “What happens if it fails inspection.” You collected the list in step four.

A pricing or cost page. Almost always the highest-converting page a small business refuses to write. Buyers search cost before anything else, and right now they are reading a competitor’s guess or a forum thread. You need not publish a single figure: publish bands and say what moves a job from the bottom to the top. “Most kitchen installs run £4,000 to £9,000, and here are the four things that decide where yours lands.” The objection is always that it helps competitors, who already know your prices. What it really does is filter out the people who were never going to buy, before they use an hour of your phone time.

7. The technical SEO basics that matter at your size

Speed, measured on real users rather than a score. PageSpeed Insights shows two things: field data from the Chrome User Experience Report covering “the previous 28-day collection period”, and lab data from a simulated load. Google notes a page “might not have sufficient data if it has been recently published or has too few samples from real users”, so on a small site the lab score is often all there is. Debug with it, do not chase it. The thresholds are the real target: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint 200 milliseconds or less, Cumulative Layout Shift 0.1 or less, each at the 75th percentile of page loads, split between mobile and desktop. The biggest free win is almost always images: resize the 4,000-pixel photographs to the size they display at. Second is deleting plugins you never use.

Mobile, checked on an actual phone. Not the browser’s responsive mode. Your phone, on mobile data, away from the office wifi. Tap the number, submit your own contact form, confirm the email arrives and is not in spam. A real share of “my SEO isn’t working” is a broken form.

HTTPS and one version of your domain. Certificates are free from most hosts. Pick one canonical form, www or not, and redirect everything else to it. Keep URLs readable, shallow and stable, and 301 any you change.

Structured data only where it genuinely applies. Google’s gallery of supported features lists the plausible ones: Local Business, Product, Review snippet, Breadcrumb, Event, Job Posting. Implement whichever describes you, validate with the Rich Results Test, move on. FAQ and How-to are no longer listed there, so FAQ markup added in hope of a rich result chases something withdrawn. Markup is not itself a ranking activity.

The honest note: most technical SEO advice is written for sites with fifty thousand URLs. Crawl budget, log file analysis, faceted navigation, hreflang. At twelve pages none of that is your constraint. If a checklist item does not connect to a page a customer would read, skip it.

8. Links and reputation, without spending anything

Last, because it is slowest, least controllable, and wasted on pages not worth visiting. What works free is unglamorous and built on relationships you already have:

• Suppliers and manufacturers. Many run dealer, installer or “where to buy” pages. You are already a customer, so ask your rep. The most overlooked free source in trades and retail.
• Trade bodies, registers and certification schemes you already pay for. Check whether membership includes a directory entry, and whether yours is filled in. Most are not.
• Local press and local institutions. Not a press release. Something usable: comment on a local issue you know about, figures from your order book, a free session for a school or community group.
• Partners and customers. Did work for a business with a website? Ask whether they will mention it, because clients enjoy being the subject of a case study.
• Your own appearances. A trade podcast, a panel, a talk at a local business group, each usually with a profile page.

Directories get one test: would a customer ever visit this site on purpose? Your sector’s real register, yes. A “link directory” existing only to list websites, no. Five to ten genuine links in a year is a good year here, and enough, because your competitors mostly have none. Reviews count as reputation too, since Google files reviews and ratings under prominence.

On paid links, one sentence and a pointer. A link you can afford at this budget is, by construction, a link you should not want, because paying for links is the practice Google’s link spam policy names, and cheap placements come from sites that sell to everyone. Which cheap SEO tasks are safe and which cause damage is covered in the piece on what is safe to buy from a marketplace. You are not missing out. You are avoiding the mistake people with small budgets make.

None of these eight steps needs a tool subscription, a retainer, a link package, a content calendar, a Domain Authority score or a backlink audit. Those are products sold to people who have not done them.

The point where this stops being a DIY job is specific, and it is not when you run out of enthusiasm. It is when all eight are done, your pages are indexed, and you cannot tell what to change next. Or when the constraint turns out to be the website itself rather than the search work. That is where AB7 Solutions is worth a call: SEO, AEO and GEO for businesses past the basics, plus the website, application and API build when the site is what holds results back. Ask for a one-off review rather than a retainer, and if the answer is to keep doing this yourself for another six months, we will say so rather than sell you one. Call +1 321 341 7733, email ab@ab7solutions.com or director@ab7solutions.com, or look at www.ab7solutions.com.

Sources: Google Search Console Help, “Add a website property to Search Console” (property types, verification methods), Performance report (metric definitions, preliminary data), Page Indexing report (not-indexed reason names), URL Inspection tool; Google Search Central, Sitemaps overview and Build and submit a sitemap, Block Search indexing with noindex, What canonicalization means, Structured data markup that Google Search supports; Google Business Profile Help, “Improve your local ranking on Google”; web.dev, Web Vitals (LCP, INP and CLS thresholds, 75th percentile); About PageSpeed Insights (field versus lab data, 28-day CrUX window); Google Search Help, “How Google autocomplete predictions work”.