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Search engine optimization (SEO) is a long-term process that helps your website rank higher in the search results. The earlier you start on your diy seo optimization efforts, the faster you’ll receive organic, targeted keywords from potential customers and clients.
While you’ll want to hire a professional at some point to handle all of your optimizations, there are simple DIY SEO tips for small businesses that can help you build a strong foundation for your website.
SEO is the process of optimizing your website to help online search engines understand what your page, blog, or other types of web property is about. It’s one way you can improve your visibility in the organic (non-paid) results for specific keywords and phrases relevant to your business.
If you drive consistent traffic from search engine results pages, you’re more likely to reach and engage your target audience. This could lead to more sales, leads, or whatever else you’re looking for from your website.
The entire process of building a strong SEO foundation for a site can take months with professional help and significant time dedicated to it on your part. There are specific techniques that must be followed when creating and optimizing content such as link building, on-page SEO, content strategy.
“Do it yourself SEO” is a phrase commonly thrown around, but what does it really mean? In this post, we’re going to go over eight simple strategies that (when used correctly) can help you improve rankings and drive more traffic to your site. Let’s get started!
Small, integral steps can be taken to begin your own DIY SEO strategy and gain more traffic from Google.
First off, Google My Business is free and allows you to take control of what users see when they search for your business on Google. For example, when a person searches for your business or your business is displayed, you’ll have control of your:
Secondly, you’ll also be able to list your site on Google Maps and enjoy ranking for local search results, which are much easier to rank for as a small business. Google My Business allows businesses to take control of their presence on Google.
Start adding your business to Google My Business here: https://www.google.com/business/
Next, citation and review sites are still important, although some sites are more important than others. You can gain targeted traffic from these sites and trust. A few of the leading sites you should add your business to are:
There are also industry-related sites that you’ll need to research and add your business to. Moz has a lot of great citations sources (grouped by industry) to consider. These citations are important, particularly in the beginning, because they give your business legitimacy.
Who doesn’t want to work with a business that has thousands of positive reviews and recommendations from other businesses? That’s some serious power when it comes to convincing people to buy from you. If you don’t have the time (or resources) or tools
Google Search Console is free and allows you to add your entire site to the platform. An integral part of technical SEO, the console will provide you with insight on:
Consequently, coverage is important because it tells you about the errors found on your site during a Google crawl. Correcting these errors helps maximize your site’s indexed pages and can be used to improve user experience.
Search Console is a tool that you should be using because it is free and can be used to identify low-hanging fruit.
Additionally, you can track the SERPs for your business’ keywords to see how they are performing over time. This will help with keyword research and brainstorming new long-tail keywords that pair well with your existing ones.
DIY SEO relies heavily on on-page optimization. You control the on-page factors that impact your site’s rankings. The keywords you choose should be naturally placed inside of your content in:
Guessing what keywords people are looking for is putting your entire SEO strategy at risk. Instead, you should use tools to help you find keywords your target demographic is already searching for.
A few tools to help you find your keywords are:
You’ll also find a lot of paid tools that can help you optimize your site for specific keywords and even track your rankings over time.
You probably already know that backlinks can be incredibly powerful, but when you’re just starting out it’s not always obvious what to do about them.
All you have to do is spend some time improving your content so that other people will want to link back to you naturally. One way to get started is using anchor text in your content that matches target keywords.
Approximately 81% of mobile users search for a product or service online. Google’s mobile-first index also makes heavy use of voice search. Your site, if it’s using WordPress, Shopify, or another platform, should be easy to optimize for mobile if it’s not optimized already.
Responsive themes will work on any screen size, allowing your visitor’s easy access to your site on their smartphones or tablets.
We recommend that you perform a mobile-friendly test.
Enter in your URL and test it to see what changes Google recommends for your site. The test will provide a screenshot of how the page looks on mobile and any issues with page loading. You can then read the report to see how you can fix your mobile site.
Clear Cache – If someone visits your website and it is slow at loading up, they will not stick around. You should regularly clear out any temporary files that might be hanging around on your server or in the visitor’s browser cache to ensure optimal performance. This caching policy helps mobile sites load faster, which means less traffic leaving before your site loads.
Internal links are one of the easiest DIY SEO practices to follow. The key is to add links on your pages and content back to other pages on your site. For example, let’s assume that you own a car repair business.
You can link up your main service page to subpages for:
When you write blogs or add new pages, they can be interlinked to other pages on your site. Strong interlinking allows you to:
Try and make internal links have a hierarchy and a purpose. Yoast has a complete guide on internal linking that’s worth reading through.
Be sure to include important keywords in your title tag, description tag, H1 tags, and anchor text. This is obviously very important for on-page SEO optimization.
Google Analytics is a must-have. Yes, you’ll be able to track your traffic to your site, but Analytics provides a wealth of information that’s useful for SEO. You can improve SEO performance in numerous ways using Analytics:
Annotations can also be used to mark when you’ve started new phases of your SEO strategy. When used properly, Analytics can provide you with information you can use to further optimize your DIY SEO for small business.
Making a good first impression only happens once. When your site is slow, users will exit the site before it loads or won’t go to multiple pages on a site. One study found over 50% of users will leave a site if it doesn’t load in three seconds or less. Speed is also a factor for mobile searches.
Focusing on user experience can lead to more sales and higher search rankings.
You’ll have a lot of opportunities to optimize your site speed:
As you’re able to lower the load time of your site, you’ll notice that Google will crawl more pages and your users will stay on the site longer. Google measures site speed by using what they call Core Web Vitals (CWV).
The average load time for your home page, give users a sense of how fast or slow it is. The pages are measured over a cellular network (a great proxy for mobile page speed).
Using these metrics, Google can determine if they should rank you higher in search results for faster websites. Speed matters because sites that take longer than 4 seconds to load begin losing conversions.
In conclusion, while DIY SEO for small business owners is possible, it’s also time-consuming. You’ll need to keep on top of the industry and work on off-page SEO – something we didn’t cover. Over time, it’s often better to bring on a dedicated team to work on your search engine optimization so that you can focus on growing your business.
With so many ways to market a company today, we’re dedicated to using the options that are right for your business. We can make sure customers have the chance to find you and see what you have to offer. Our dedication shows in everything we do! Contact Us.
