How To Do SEO Of Your Site Yourself?

Search engine optimization is better left to SEO experts but if you’re a small business and don’t have the budget to hire an SEO expert or are a tech enthusiast and want to try out SEO yourself, follow these tips to get started. Moreover, look into an SEO rank tracker to track your SEO performance.

Set Up Analytics

You need access to the important SEO metrics of your website to monitor your website and see the results of your SEO strategies. Many websites already have analytics platforms set up. However, if they aren’t, look for Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, and Google Tag Manager.

With these platforms, you’ll collectively get access to pageviews, conversions, engagement metrics, your average position in search results, impressions, click-through rate, event tracking, analytics tracking, and others.

If you’re just starting, this will be overwhelming for you. So, start with one platform and get to know it, then set up the next one. An expert can set up this within an hour but don’t worry if you take many days in this step. For step-by-step tutorials on setting up each platform, turn to YouTube.

Perform An SEO Audit Of Your Website

An SEO audit allows you to check out your SEO performance so you find out which strategies are working and where you’re lacking. Many SEO audit tools are either free or free to try, so you can use their help to know where your website stands in terms of SEO. You should audit your website once a month.

With an SEO audit, you will know things like on-page SEO issues, technical SEO issues, and branding issues.

When you perform an SEO audit, you will notice many issues, and not all of them require immediate resolution. So, you should prioritize high-impact issues. For instance, if you’re getting a 404 error on one of your product pages that is receiving a good percentage of clicks, you should fix it immediately.

On the other hand, some issues are low impact and you can fix them later or don’t touch upon them depending on your strategy and the impact of the issue. For example, if some of your pages’ title tags are more than 60 characters, it’s considered an SEO issue, but of low impact. You can delay the solution of this issue for other high-impact issues.

Keyword Research

Keywords are the search terms that allow you to rank on a search engine. In keyword research, you find the keywords that you should target and include in your site’s content for trying to appear on search results for those keywords or search terms.

Use Google Keyword Planner to search for keywords relevant to your niche and to select the ones you want to target. So, you should create a list of your niche-related keywords. The keywords must be related to the content you will write and your business otherwise, even if you get ranked for an unrelated keyword, you won’t have the right product to sell so the ranking efforts will go in vain.

Search for relevant long-tail keywords with medium competition, for starters. This is because these terms are not searched as much as shorter keywords and the likelihood of your site ranking for these keywords will be higher.

Furthermore, focus on the user intent that shows what the customer needs when they search for a phrase. Search the keyword on Google to understand its intent.

For example; You have an automotive store and you want to rank for a core keyword “headlights for [car name]”. If you search this keyword on Google, it will show transactional results where headlights for that car model are shown and the user can buy them. So, this keyword is right for the product page of your store that has headlights for that car model.

You can include this keyword in an information blog, but the blog should be ranked for another keyword that has informational user intent such as “fix headlights of [car name]”. But if you want to create a blog revolving around the keyword “headlights for [car name]”, you should use “top” or “best” with it to create a listicle where you mention the top 10 headlights for a certain car.

Create Useful Content

Once you have selected the keywords and their intent, the next step is to create content for it that is genuinely useful.

At its core, Google wants to provide users with the best content that solves their problems or answers the question they are asking. So, creating content that fulfills the reader’s needs should be your top priority.

Many SEO beginners include too many keywords on one page, called keyword stuffing, and risk their site appearing spammy and tricky. Ensure the keywords are relevant to the content and they appear naturally in the content for the best user experience.

Moreover, your entire site should be easy to use and understand for people of all regions and languages. Therefore, use simple English. Plus, include headings and lists so the content is scannable. Moreover, incorporate images and videos for more engagement. Keep checking performance of your site with a rank checker. See rank checker pricing.

Try Internal Linking

Internal linking is links of your website spread across your own site. They help users and Google navigate through your website and understand your content. Therefore, include at least 3 internal links on each page of your site.

Before you start linking anything to each page, keep in mind that the links should be relevant to the page and give additional information to the user about something. Moreover, when creating internal links, the anchor text should not be “click here” to read more about LED headlights.

The anchor text must be descriptive and tells the user and the search engine what to expect in the link they will click. So, if your content is about headlights and you want to include a link to LED headlights, the anchor should be “LED headlights”.

Earn Backlinks

Backlinks are links of your site on other sites. If reputable sites include links to your site, it can boost your site’s ranking and credibility. But this is not an easy feat. This is why many newcomers buy links which is never a good practice. You can even get penalized for ranking in Google search results.

So, you should earn backlinks by creating engaging content that people would want to share. Look for trendy topics and create content around them for more shareability. Moreover, promote content on social media to maximize the number of eyeballs on your content.

Update Old Content

Google search results also show the date and year of the content’s last update for most results. This can increase the click-through rate for sites that update their old content regularly. Because if you find two similar results on Google but the one was updated only a month ago while the other was updated two years ago, you will click the recent one.

So, regularly check your old content and perform updates like updating the prices, and stats, including corrections, and adding new ideas.

Conclusion

DIY SEO is not as hard as some people think. You should have a learning attitude and access to tools like a search rank checker and Google’s free tools to pull this off. Good luck!