So, if you’re a small business owner, this is a post that might tickle your pickle as it’s something that can help you to save a bit of money whilst also, potentially improving the presence of your business online. This article probably isn’t for you if you think anything other than Search Engine Optimisation when you see those three letters in SEO. Plus, DIY SEO is ideal as you’ll want to get it right because no one will care about your business as much as you do.
I decided to take a look at 3 actionable, invaluable DIY SEO tips that hopefully, you can implement straight away. If you read any of this and find that they are out of your skillset, fear not. You’ll be learning some new stuff so it’s not like you’re wasting your time. And if you do know a thing or two, perhaps this listing could help you understand why your SEO campaigns are not growing, or if you’re spending too much on them. So, without further ado, let’s dive into these tips that will ultimately save you money, because you won’t be paying someone else to do it! What’s not to like?
Blogging and Social Media
This is something that Google and other search engines don’t really appreciate when it comes to websites that remain aloof from the rest of the social networking sites. Even though Google says that they don’t consider social media to be a ranking factor they’re watching everything. They track your interactions and look at what you’re doing, who you’re interacting with and so on. Not being on social media could be more detrimental than you think.
Another big tip is to use or switch to a WordPress website. WordPress is in essence a blogging platform but many businesses use it as a content management system for a complete website which is perfectly acceptable using WordPress will save you lots of time and energy and also money because you’ll be able to benefit from the advice and help of the whole WordPress community if you run into any problems.
Using WordPress will also enable you to easily create a company blog if you don’t already have one, and keep it up to date with relevant, informative content. Experts recommend this as Google tends to favour sites that have fresh, up-to-date content over sites that don’t change much in the way of new, updated content.
Keyword Research
These are probably the single most important things for any SEO campaign and should be the first step that is taken. Things like “SEO Manchester“, “plumbers in London” or “Birmingham coffee shops” are some examples of what could get searched on a daily basis in your sector or local area. A free site with a tool that allows you to carry out some very basic keyword research is keywordtool.io.
Long-tail keyword phrases are keywords with an extra one or two words, such as “SEO agency near me” or “web design company in Preston” but they don’t have to have a location in them either. They can also be questions, so something like “What is the distance from the earth to the sun”. Long-tail keywords are, often, easier to rank for and can drive just as much traffic as ranking for one of your higher priority keywords. For just $19.95 a month with hittail.com, you can find new ideas for long-tail keywords as the software will tell you your best long-tail keywords and how to write articles, web content or blogs using them to get the site ranked.
On-page optimisation is a part of your keyword research and it’s a damn important one. In short, it’s optimising your pages for the target keywords to ensure that the site has a chance of ranking for those keywords.
Links
Having a healthy backlink profile is vitally important to your site ranking. In most cases, without a backlink profile, your site will struggle to rank and one way that you can go about generating links to your site is by creating great content. If you create industry-specific, relevant content that is high quality and authoritative, then you should start to see links being generated to your site.
Another good way to go about actively building links to your site is to reach out to bloggers in your niche. This will help to generate links to your site from relevant sources in your field. You can contact bloggers to see if they will write about you or your products with a backlink in the content of your site. If you do manage to get links from these kinds of sources, it will help to increase and improve your rankings.
If there’s a site or a service that you use, offer them a testimonial. It’s likely that they will feature the testimonial you provide them and give you a link back to your site, especially if you include on and send it over to them, they probably won’t want to spend too much time editing any content that they’re sent, if it reads well, they’re likely going to just want to publish it.