Do SEO by yourself – what you need to do and know

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a discipline of digital marketing that is necessary in order to increase the ranking of your website in internet search results related to your products and/or services. SEO can be a complicated science to master, and there’s an entire industry of experts and ‘gurus’ out there who sell consultancy and outsourced optimisation work to businesses that can’t do it all themselves.

With that said, investing in professional SEO services isn’t going to be cheap and it’s generally not worth doing unless you can put an adequate amount of capital behind it. However, this doesn’t mean there aren’t rudimentary SEO steps you can take to you give your website a boost in online exposure, even if it seems minor when compared with more extensive campaigns.

So, if you don’t have any digital marketing experience or a budget to hire outside help – take a look at these following tips for doing SEO by yourself.

How to start SEO by yourself:

You don’t need to be professional to do SEO for your website. Here are 5 simple steps to get your website succeed with SEO:

  1. Finding powerful keywords – so you can get more traffic
  2. Examine your competitors – check what they do and how
  3. Plan your site – so you can convert them to leads
  4. Optimise your site – get on the top of Google
  5. Get links pointing to your domain – use easy link building options

 

1. Find your keywords

blogger thinking about keywords for SEO results

Keywords are the basic building blocks behind a lot of SEO work because they are the basic signals search engines like Google use to identify and categorise content on the internet. Understanding your businesses’ keywords is important if you want to target what your customer base is looking for and sell it to them.

You should never just assume that you already know the right keywords. Depending on your audience, they may use different terms when searching for your products and/or services than you might expect.

In order to discover the correct keywords to focus your campaign on, you need to perform a process known as keyword research. This helps to give you an understanding of the phrases and jargon your audience is using to find the products you sell and will help you determine how high in demand they are.

You can either use the Google Keyword Planner or one of the many other keyword research tools out there. The paid toolsets will obviously have more useful data than the free ones, but for this very basic scale of SEO this kind of in-depth data isn’t as relevant to you.

2. Examine your competitors

Examine your competitors

The next step is to take a look at what your competitors are doing in the digital space. This will let you find opportunities and determine threat areas where you need to be careful.

Do some internet searches for your keywords and see what other businesses are top of the rankings, taking note of what they might be doing to get there. Examine businesses that both share your business model as well as others that might not directly compete with you.

When reviewing your competitors, you should try to determine the following 4 things:

  1. What part of their digital marketing is doing well?
  2. What does their content have that mine doesn’t?
  3. How is their website structured to target keywords?
  4. What kind of special offers or features do they have to boost their engagement?

You should also take the time to investigate their reviews and testimonials, as well as their social media pages. Here you can gauge how they interact with their audience and what the general public sentiment about the business is.

All of this will help inform you on what unique traits of your business you can leverage as a part of your digital marketing campaign. Don’t hesitate to exploit a weakness in your competitors’ SEO mix!

AntRanks is a tool you can use that’s useful for checking and measuring SEO rankings.

3. Plan your website

Plan your website

Now comes the time to implement some actual SEO tactics based on the information you have gathered in steps 1 and 2. Ideally, you should build a site architecture that’s focused on each page targeting a keyword or set of keywords.

For example, if you run a gardening supplies store and “organic fertilizers” was one of your keywords, you would want to make a dedicated page on your website that included everything customers could want to know about the product and your unique offer. Google and other search engines prefer when users can find all the info they need in as few clicks as possible.

4. Optimise your website

optimise your website for SEO

Now that you’ve created the website’s pages, you need to do some further optimisation work in order to perfect them. This means you need to make sure that your website’s meta tags include your keywords and clearly explain the purpose of the webpage.

For example:

Keyword: Designing Garden

Meta-title: 15 Tips for Designing Garden | Your Brand Name

Meta-description: Include your keywords in the description (up to 154 characters)

Of course, you need to be careful of ‘overoptimizing’ your website. This occurs when search engines determine you’ve been to spammy and aggressive with your tactics. As a general rule – only include your keyword where it’s going to be useful for someone reading the site, don’t spam it everywhere you possibly can as this will work against your ranking.

Your website also needs to look and function well – SEO work becomes meaningless if people leave your website as soon as they arrive because of how ugly and/or unusable it is. You need to make sure your website loads quickly, has a nice graphical design and is optimised for viewing on mobile devices.

If you need help producing graphics or auditing the technical performance of your website, there are plenty of freelancers on websites like Fiverr that you can engage for a low price.

5. Get links pointing to your domain

In the world of SEO, there are few things more beneficial than having a highly trusted website host a link to yours. This is seen as a vote of confidence in your website, telling search engines like Google that your business is both trustworthy and popular.

Generating these links is no easy feat as it can be difficult to earn trust online, especially if you’re entirely new. You can engage services like FatJoe to help connect you with bloggers and content marketing specialists that can help you earn organic links to your domain.

Who is FatJoe? – They are not rappers 🙂 It is an SEO company providing high quality SEO services for more than 1000 Agencies all over the world. They also do blogger outreach, and content writing. You don’t need to be an agency! The good thing is that you can have access to tools and services offered to agencies. By doing this you will save up to 80% of your spending. Here is their sign-up and ex-plainer site. Once you sign-up, you can get links from $30!

Fat Joe - SEO links

Conclusion

If you implement the above steps, you should notice an increase in your website’s discoverability. Larger SEO gains can only be achieved with larger amount of capital being spent on either building an in-house team or engaging an experienced 3rd party firm. If you also get stuck with this above, you might get in touch with some reputable SEO agencies in Australia.

Mike Smith
Mike Smith
Executive Editor at Best in Australia. Mike has spent over a decade covering news related to business leaders and entrepreneurs around Australia and across the world. You can contact Mike here.
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