What is the most bang for buck

I have an e-commerce business that has previously utilised cheeky backlink packages with great success. In fact it has consistently made a big impact for 2 years since implementing them.

I can’t use typical marketing methods such as Google/ FB ads for additional growth due to restrictions (completely legal product though), so have to rely on organic traffic as much as possible. I’ve tried to achieve this via SEO efforts primarily in the past, but in dire need of a spring clean.

With our initial spend on the SEO bundle we aimed for long chain keywords with low competition and the results were far better than we had expected. So now we are wanting to start targeted some of the higher competition keywords with much higher volume whilst increasing our overall visibility. With this budget we could go for a similar but larger bundle than before, and in turn would hope for similar results (adjusting for difference in competition).

Now it goes without saying, cheeky naughty back link bundles aren’t the best, or most risk adverse options and ultimately I’m now looking at a fork in the road as to how is best to proceed.

I have a very limited budget of £2k, and want to try and get the most bang for my buck in terms of corrective action/ addition to our current situation. What’s the smartest play here?

I’m not just looking for an easy solution here and appreciate in-depth analysis and ongoing SEO efforts with organic link building and hitting blog content regularly is the way to go too. As it stands the next 6-12 months is about an in depth audit of the site in its current form, and road mapping a heavy amount of SEO focused content with the hope that any link building and other projects will then start impacting alongside it for another push. I’m a one man team on limited funds so I try and do as much as I can solo, but really could do with another level of impact that we’ve previously experienced.

I appreciate any input, and hope it goes without saying I won’t share who we used previously, I’m genuinely after some advice not to promote their services. Just want to know whether that’s still the right way to go?