So what actually moves the needle for SEO?

Link building, mostly. And the higher the domain ranking for those links, the more valuable the search traffic you get becomes. 

SEO providers like to shy away from this cold, inconvenient fact... for one obvious reason: it's hard to build quality links.

So what can you do within your budget? Can you still get results even if you can't afford hundreds of dollars per link?

We get creative.