How To Do SEO Yourself?

SEO is a highly skilled profession and doing search engine optimisation on your own to optimise your business can be challenging and overwhelming.

There are people who would like to go the hard way to do SEO on their own due to the SEO cost or having the confidence to execute tasks themselves.

While someone with a minimum to zero SEO knowledge can undergo basic search engine optimisation on their own, it is worth noting that SEO is a serious business and you may find yourself doing a lot and achieving little.

On the other hand, it’s better to do basic SEO on your own if you are limited by budget instead of getting cheap SEO which can make things worse.

Now, after covering a few key points, let’s get started and learn how to do SEO yourself to improve your ranking.

Table of Contents:

1. Website is the Foundation
2. Dos and Dons
3. Keyword Planning
4. Write Catchy Title Tag
5. Produce Quality Content
6. Produce Media
7. Internal Linking
8. Social Share
9. Google My Business Optimisation
10. Online Reputation
11. Learn From Your Competition

Mobile Optimised Website is the Foundation for SEO – Get It Right

An SEO optimised website lays the foundation for your business and digital marketing endeavour. With the number of mobile users increasing every year, the amount of time spent on mobile internet is also on the rise. So it is of utmost necessity that your website is well optimised for mobile devices. Otherwise, you might be losing a huge volume of web traffic.

For optimum mobile optimisation, you must focus on on-site design, structure, page speed and more. Let’s discuss some of the basic factors that impact your mobile SEO and need to be taken care of.

1. Page speed: Page speed is the critical ranking factor and helps to determine your website performance. If your page loading speed is slow then viewers are more likely to visit some other site. So make sure to optimise your page speed to offer a better user experience. It is recommended that your page should load in relatively less time.
2. Mobile Consideration: Responsive design or fluid layout is ideal for mobile SEO optimisation. If your website is able to fit in any screen size then it will always carry the upper hand in terms of ranking.
3. Dedicated Mobile Site: For a complex business process, you may like to have a dedicated mobile site the search engine optimisation would be far more complex to handle.

Before you embark on the SEO journey, you must get a professional website with highly optimised content. Learn more about website design costs, it is worth getting a quality website to ensure your long-term SEO goal will have a solid foundation.

Caution: Do not attempt serious stuff unless you know it well

If you don’t have a good knowledge of the basic aspects of SEO then you might end up hurting your website visibility. So, it is worth knowing about Good vs Bad SEO practices first and only work on things that are easy to implement and do not involve any risks.

For instance, Link building is no doubt a great way to boost your website search rankings. However, it is a very complex process, and improper implementation of link-building tactics can dramatically downgrade your website to a large degree. You may experience Google ranking drop dramatically if you will implement poorly.

To avoid such outcomes, you must always refrain from practising cheap link-building tactics like purchasing or selling backlinks, creating poor content, and over-relying on third-party software to build poor automated links.

But Google is smart enough to identify any manipulation. And once it catches your website gaining an unnatural number of links much too fast, your website can be on the verge of experiencing a substantial drop of traffic and rankings.

In worst cases, Google may even end up penalising your website if your tactics are found to defy Google’s webmaster’s guidelines. That makes the recovery process almost next to impossible.

Link building is a long-term process that requires advanced and strategic planning. Read our blog on the best link-building strategies to get an in-depth outlook and establish a strong base.

Keywords Planning – Primary vs Secondary

Keywords are the most essential component of SEO rich content. They are the words or phrases that people are already searching for on the internet and implementing them in your content would elevate its relevancy and increase the chances of getting higher web traffic.

Keywords can be categorised into two parts: primary and secondary. Primary keywords are the principal keywords closely related to the search intent and the context of your content. Whereas secondary keywords are the extended version of the primary keywords and are more closely related to the search intent than the primary keywords.

A perfect balance of both secondary and primary keywords throughout the content is the secret ingredient of well-optimised and high-traffic generating SEO content. To achieve that, you need to begin with strong and substantial keyword research and planning either by using keyword research tools or manually.

Having a good understanding of keywords is the first step toward producing quality content and prioritising the optimisation process.

Insert the primary keyword in the Meta Title, Meta Descriptions, SEO Title Tag, and Headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.), the first 200 words of your introduction.

In the case of secondary keywords distribute them naturally throughout the content but make sure that their density is less than that of primary keywords. Also, avoid keyword stuffing at all costs.

Note: Keywords can be both a long tail and a short tail. Usually, the long-tail keywords are more specific to the topic with low search volume and tend to perform better than the short-tail keywords.

Create Catchy Meta Title and Description

The page title and Meta description play a crucial role in accelerating your SEO game as they are the first thing viewers will notice in Google SERPs.

In simple words, the page title is the short one-line content description that gives the basic idea of what the content is about. A meta description is a summary describing the content on a specific page.

Make sure your meta title character limit is taken into account while framing the eye-catchy page titles.

Furthermore, both the page title and description must be unique, descriptive, powerful and enriched with the right set of primary keywords. If you make any changes then learn the time taken by Google to update meta title and another aspect of the title tag optimisation process.

You should regularly visit key pages meta tags and optimise as per the data gathered through the process.

Produce High-Quality Regular Content

We know that content is king. So if you want to reap maximum benefits from doing search engine optimisation on your own, one of the simplest and most effective strategies is to learn how to write SEO friendly content. This is one skill which you would need for a long time.

You can use AI tools for content planning, learn more about ChatGPT copywriting impact.

A high-quality SEO-optimised content is one that not only addresses a certain problem but also provides a legit solution. It has the potential to get more social shares as well as gain a huge number of relevant backlinks. That helps in increasing visibility and generates fresh leads continuously.

Need a professional SEO copywriter, then talk to webapex today!

The important elements that make up top-quality content include the integration of well-optimised images, videos, relevant SEO infographics, internal and external links, good readability( easy to read and comprehend), easy to navigate, and authentic information that meets both the users and your business’s needs.

You should never miss out on these to ensure your content is attractive, nurtures high value and stays relevant in the long term.

Importantly, share your new pages on social media to build exposure. Because regular content creation accelerates the user experience and helps in capturing the audience’s attention and trust; which directly increases audience retention rate as well as website traffic.

Also, the majority of people read online before they make any purchase decision. So a value powered content with clear information can boost overall conversion.

Overall, it has a direct impact on the growth of your business and helps you build a strong brand persona over time.

Note: Avoid thin content production. Get help from professionals, and learn about SEO copywriting rates if you wish to hire a content producer for your business.

Produce Photos and Videos

Photos and videos are the visual representation of your content. The use of relevant media content helps to navigate your content easily and enhances its overall appeal to the customers.

And it is worth noting that with the changing times producing more content with videos and images is becoming the new norm.

A highly optimised image or video is a great catalyst to your SEO marketing strategy. It helps to deliver a positive user experience, achieve quality links, and your image/ video has the potential to show up in Google search results.

Because it makes it easier and seamless to communicate and connect with your target audience and attract quality and relevant traffic.

Learn more from our blog on how to optimise images for websites and SEO.

Optimise Internal Linking

Internal linking is simply the linking of one page to another page of the same website. It is an indisputable and powerful SEO element that can help you rank higher in Google organic search results.

The main objectives of optimising internal linking for SEO is to help in smooth website navigation both for crawlers as well as humans, distribute page rank authority within the website, and determine website hierarchy.

So you need to focus on creating strategic internal links within the site to achieve the best results in terms of user engagement and a clean and extended network of pages.

Some of the crucial and basic ways in which you can optimise internal linking are as follows:

• Use relevant, informative and keyword-rich anchor text as hyperlinks. The texts should most preferably be the primary phrase of the content you want to link to but make sure you don’t overdo it.
• Avoid creating a variety of links to the same page as that doesn’t help in any way to increase page rank weightage; instead, it often hurts ranking. Moreover, it can even confuse your visitors as well as crawlers.
• Create relevant hyperlinks from the page with the highest backlinks and internal links to the page you desire to be ranked.
• Insert links in new linkable content in the process to the relevant pages which have higher page rank weightage.
• Create a myriad of various high-quality content to form more opportunities for internal linking.
• Avoid linking to your contact page and home page at all costs.
• Avoid hoarding quality internal links in the footer and header of your content. This is a bad SEO strategy.
• To enhance your link-building strategy use follow links instead of no-follow links.

Social Share

Promoting your posts on social media is of great value to your SEO strategy. Although it doesn’t have a direct impact on improving SEO value, it does help in leveraging your brand exposure and recognition by increasing your website’s visibility.

To begin with, you need to post your content to a wide variety of social media networks. But it requires a good amount of strategic planning to enjoy the best fruits of your social media marketing.

Follow the important actionable techniques below that will help you achieve maximum results-

• Post at the right time meaning post at the time your target audience hangs out the most on the internet. That’ll increase the chances of your content going viral and gaining more social shares.
• Include popular hashtags on your posts. You can use various tools to determine the hashtags relevant to your posts.
• Don’t just post without any context. For higher CTR, make sure you list out some of the best results from your content along with the page link. That helps to create an appetite in the viewers and entice them to visit your site.
• Promote your content via social media influencers. With the help of simple email outreach, you can get someone with a larger base of followers to promote your content.

Keep Google My Business Updated & Post Regularly

Google My Business is an incredible tool that helps you to elevate your local SEO marketing.

Through it, you can display your business to a wide range of local visitors and communicate with them to get practical insights on your website by collective online reviews; which facilitates you to make positive changes required for your businesses’ growth.

And the key to improving your brand reputation is to create posts and update your account regularly. But first, make sure you fill out all your necessary profile information without any inconsistency and have an optimised Google My Business Account.

Follow the guidelines and avoided getting Google My Business post rejected.

Next up, create posts regularly based on the services like new features, offers, products and other events. Most of the posts generally show up in the search results for the first 7 days from posting. So you can maintain posting once to twice a week or more.

But if you want a prominent offer to show up to your customers then don’t post it all along with the other posts.

Here are a few tips to effectively post on GMB:

• Always use high quality and well-optimised photos.
• Keep the writings in the GMB posters short and keyword-rich.
• Maintain professionalism at all levels.

Engage with customers online – Reply to every single review

It is only natural to receive comments on your posts, and you should never let go of this golden opportunity to connect with your customers.

Replying to online reviews, be it positive or negative is very important for your business. That sets your reputation of providing seamless customer support.

It is observed that about 70% of people rely on the review page to make any purchase decision.

So make sure you properly thank all the customers that are happy with your services.

On the other hand, apologise to those who are dissatisfied with your services and take the responsibility to solve the issues. According to a survey, businesses that replied to negative reviews tend to see a 16% surge in their sales.

Moreover, websites with diverse and customised reviews, both in terms of quantity and quality sends Google signals to be legitimate and trustworthy. That directly boosts your local SEO.

However, sometimes responding to every review can be difficult and tedious. Also handling negative reviews can often get overwhelming and pose a threat to your business reputation. In that case, you can take help from the experts of our online reputation management team to give you much required guidance on review management.

Learn from Your Competition

Keeping an eye on your competition aids you significantly to stay ahead of your game. It helps you promote innovation and build better content from time to time.

Also, learning how your competitors execute their SEO strategies can help you further strengthen your SEO marketing strategy and outperform your competitors.

Here are some important tips that will help you get started with competition analysis-

1. Identify your real competitors: Your real competitors are the ones that are ruling the Google search results with the desired keywords you want to rank for. A simple way to find out about them is by typing in the required keyword and looking for the websites that rank in SERPs. Continue to do this with 10-20 more keywords for better results. For increased accuracy can also use specific tools for competition analysis.
2. Keyword Analysis: After you have made a list of competitors, you need to perform keyword research to discover the keywords that are giving your competitors the highest web traffic. The main aim is to create the content based on what your competitors are already ranking for but in a more detailed and sophisticated manner. Since it is difficult to carry out keyword analysis manually, make sure you use keyword research tools for the purpose.
3. Analyse backlink profiles: Getting backlinks is highly critical for increasing your conversion rates. Perform a backlink analysis to discover the pages that have linked to that of your competitors. It helps to achieve relevant, high authority and quality backlinks for your website.
4. Learn their social media strategy: Since leveraging social media properly can bring in floods of leads, it is important to analyse your competitor’s social media behaviour extensively and learn to implement them in your strategy.
5. Look for the social media channels they have been promoting in, notice the behaviour they’ve with the customers, how often they publish content, what techniques they use to entice their customers into reading their content etc.