According to a 2022 survey, over half of American small business owners invest in search engine optimization. Nearly 80% say they understand SEO without any outside help, and about 40% do SEO themselves without hiring third-party companies.
Are you interested in learning how to do SEO yourself? Use this step-by-step guide to manage your company’s SEO and begin attracting more traffic to your website.
Understanding SEO Basics
Companies like yours have been using search engine optimization for decades. They quickly started to realize the importance of making it easy for potential customers to find them through search engines once Yahoo and Google showed up on the scene in the 1990s.
SEO has been an important part of website success for companies ever since. At first, many companies primarily relied on exploitative black-hat SEO practices, such as keyword stuffing and cloaking, to manipulate search engines. But as time went on, search engines closed the loopholes that allowed black-hat SEO to produce reliable results and forced companies to evolve.
This eventually led to the development of more ethical white-hat SEO practices, like creating high-quality content containing search-friendly keywords and building up a steady stream of backlinks, to give websites a boost on search engine results pages (or SERPs). Businesses have perfected these practices over time and continue to utilize them today to draw in customers and increase sales.
What Is SEO, and Why Is It Important for Your Business?
SEO is a practice that involves making improvements to websites to make them more appealing to search engines. The more seriously a webmaster takes SEO, the higher their website will rank on Google and other search engines.
Search engines take many factors into account when it comes to a website’s SEO. Whether you decide to try and figure out how to do SEO yourself or hire a company to assist you, you can give your site a big boost and generate more organic traffic by adhering to specific standards regarding content creation, technical configuration, and more.
SEO is vital to your business because, without it, your company’s website may get buried beneath the websites of your competitors. Without a sound SEO strategy, you’ll struggle to reach that coveted first page of search engine results pages.
A recent study found that almost one-third of internet users click on the first result after searching for something online and don’t venture any further than that. This means that securing a spot at the top of the page is vital to your success on any search engine.
In recent years, AI-driven tools have revolutionized the SEO landscape, allowing businesses to streamline their efforts by automating processes, analyzing user behavior, and predicting search trends. Using AI in SEO enables deeper analysis of data, helping identify optimization opportunities that may have been missed by manual methods. This ensures your strategy stays up-to-date with constantly evolving search algorithms.
Search Engine Ranking Factors
It’s tricky to determine how to do SEO yourself because so many search engine ranking factors come into play. They include:
- How quickly a website loads
- The quality of the content on a website
- Keywords used in a website’s content
- Backlinks earned by a website
- Whether a website is mobile friendly
Keyword Research: Understanding What People Search For
Over 425,000 law firms exist in the US alone. If you’re trying to drum up interest in a law firm, filling it with keywords that apply to your industry is important.
You’ll want it to have everything from basic keywords like “law firm” and “attorney” to more advanced ones like “premises liability lawsuit” and “dog bite liability.” You can use each keyword you choose for your website to target different audiences based on factors like intent and stage in the buying process.
But first, you must understand which keywords people are most likely to target when searching for your law firm’s website. Let’s discuss the importance of keyword research as you aim to find out how to do SEO yourself through on-page optimization.
Targeting the Right Audience
Who is the target audience for your business website? This is a question you should pose long before you even consider setting up a site in the first place.
Try to make your target audience as specific as possible to let Google and other search engines know which users you want sent your way. If, for instance, you run a law firm that caters to those on the hunt for personal injury lawyers who specialize in car accident lawsuits, define this as your audience.
From there, you can use SEO concepts like keyword targeting to incorporate keywords relevant to your target audience into your content. You should also use data to find conversion rate optimization tactics that work for your business.
Free and Paid Keyword Research Tools
Even the most tech-savvy SEO companies don’t instinctively know which keywords they should use on business websites to send them soaring up SERPs. They rely on free and paid keyword research tools to assist them.
Free keyword research tools include:
Paid keyword research tools include:
Optimizing Your Website Content for Search Engines
From the second you start setting up a website for your company, your goal should be to optimize every piece of content you put up on it for search engines and, more specifically, Google.
Google processes over 8.5 billion searches each day, so staying in this search engine’s good graces is paramount if you want people to find your company online with ease. Remind yourself of this repeatedly as you aim to learn how to do SEO yourself.
These are a few ways in which you can successfully optimize your website content for search engines.
Creating High-Quality and Informative Content
If you want Google and other search engines to suggest your website to consumers, you need to prepare to welcome them with well-written articles that serve them relevant and targeted information and address their key pain points. These articles should also have strong titles that are the correct length and include meta descriptions to appease the search engines.
For example, a law firm’s website should have general service pages for different personal injury cases, including car accidents, slip-and-fall accidents, and more. It should also have location-specific pages for your most important markets where you drive the most revenue.
At the same time, it should have a blog with articles that feature titles like:
- “How Can I File a Personal Injury Lawsuit?”
- “Who Should I Trust To Handle My Personal Injury Case?”
- “What Is the Average Personal Injury Settlement?”
Coming up with a content planning strategy is key. New content must be posted regularly, and old or underperforming content must be updated.
Keyword Optimization
While putting together service pages and blog articles for your business website, weave primary keywords into them along with secondary and semantic keywords. Secondary keywords are words or phrases closely related to primary keywords, while semantic keywords relate to primary keywords on a more conceptual level.
Internal Linking Structure
As you add more content to your website, don’t be afraid to link back to content you’ve posted previously. By taking this approach, you can make your site “sticky” and encourage people to click from one article to the next.
The average American only stays on the same website for between 50 and 60 seconds. You can increase that number by making internal linking a top priority.
Website Usability and Technical SEO
Figuring out how to do SEO yourself can begin to get tricky and even technical at times when it comes to your website’s usability.
But generally speaking, your goal is to make your business website easily accessible for computer and mobile users. Otherwise, you could scare people off by not having your website’s pages load quickly enough or by not making your site look aesthetically pleasing on all devices.
Importance of Website Speed and Mobile Friendliness
If people come across a link to your business website after Googling a keyword and clicking on it, it needs to load immediately. If it takes even a few seconds to load, guess what? People may click the “Back” button and visit a different site instead.
You can improve your site’s loading speed by:
- Keeping website design simple
- Trying not to overload it with images
- Utilizing the right website host
Your site also needs to adapt seamlessly to mobile devices, as mobile traffic accounts for around 60% of all internet traffic.
Optimizing Website Images for Faster Loading Times
An easy way to improve the loading times for your website is by optimizing each image on it. You can do this by:
- Choosing the right images
- Resizing images
- Compressing images
You should also perform site speed audits to see how images, content, etc. impact its loading times.
Building Backlinks: The Currency of Trust Online
A 2023 survey found that over two-thirds of American consumers trust U.S.-based small businesses. Take advantage of this and improve your position in the marketplace by establishing yourself as a trusted authority on your subject and earning backlinks.
What Are Backlinks, and Why Are They Important?
Backlinks are links to your business website that appear on other websites. They suggest people can trust your site to provide factual information.
Google and other search engines take backlinks seriously and give businesses that have accumulated them a bump when putting together SERPs. Treat backlinks like the valuable online currency they are and attempt to collect as many as you can.
Simple Strategies for Business Owners To Build Backlinks
As you seek to learn how to do SEO yourself, you’ll likely run into the same problem most businesses do: How do you get other businesses to endorse and recommend the services on your site on their sites? Fortunately, there are a few surefire strategies that can work wonders for business owners aiming to earn backlinks.
Guest Blogging on Relevant Websites
Many other website owners are scrambling to add as much content as they can to their websites. Touch base with relevant sites and ask if they would allow you to guest blog in exchange for backlinks.
Participating in Online Communities and Forums
About three-fourths of internet users take part in online communities and forums. Posting links to your site within them can build brand recognition and backlinks.
Developing Relationships with Local Businesses
As you work to build up your trust & authority online, you must also do the same in your local community. If you’re a moving company, get in touch with local renovation companies whose services your customers might also need. If you have a designer make an image for you, ask them to post about it on their blog with a link to your site. These organic link-building opportunities are the truest reflection of your business’s authenticity.
Local SEO for Brick-and-Mortar Businesses
Is your business trying to use its website to attract customers in your specific area? Local SEO can help. It’ll target those within your community who are searching for a business like yours.
Optimizing Your Google Business Profile
Just like having a listing in the Yellow Pages helped people find your business 20 years ago, having your Google Business Profile and other listings established helps you get found both online and offline today. Your Google Business Profile helps people from your local area find your hours and contact information, leave and read reviews, and navigate to your business using Google Maps.
Local Citation Building
Incorporating your business name, address, and phone number into your website’s content is one way to encourage Google to show your site to those in your area. But you should also look to list your NAP in business directories, on social media platforms, and on review sites as part of the local citation building process.
Tracking Your SEO Progress and Making Adjustments
In a perfect world, you’ll start to see positive results after you make the effort to learn how to do SEO yourself. However, you won’t know how well your SEO efforts are working until you begin collecting data and implementing it to improve your website’s SEO. Here’s how to track your SEO progress and make adjustments accordingly.
Understanding Key SEO Metrics
Begin monitoring your SEO progress by getting a better understanding of and tracking the key SEO metrics. They include:
- How much organic traffic your business website receives
- How well your business site ranks for different keywords
- How long visitors spend on your website
Free SEO Tracking Tools Like Google Search Console & Analytics
Many free SEO tracking tools exist to help you monitor your business website’s SEO progress. They include:
Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid
One drawback of learning how to do SEO yourself versus leaving it to the professionals is that you might make crucial mistakes. Steer clear of the following mistakes at all costs.
Keyword Stuffing and Other Black-Hat SEO Tactics
Keyword stuffing is one of the worst mistakes you can make. This black-hat SEO practice involves cramming as many keywords into your content as you can, often to the point where it’s unreadable. Search engines will penalize you mightily for using keyword stuffing as part of your SEO push.
Other black-hat SEO tactics to avoid include:
- Buying backlinks
- Spinning articles
- Posting duplicate content
Ignoring Mobile Responsiveness
Your business website must be mobile friendly for Google and other search engines to recommend it to mobile searchers. Test your site regularly to ensure it performs up to industry standards on mobile devices and showcases your complete website structure.
Neglecting Website Speed Optimization
If your business website takes too long to load, it will discourage visitors from exploring your offerings. Speed up your site by optimizing images and improving the back end.
Not Focusing on Creating Valuable Content
Each piece of content you create for your website should contain useful information and current data to show its value to search engines. Edit and fact-check content to ensure its accuracy.
Other SEO Strategies You Can Implement
Want to go the extra mile when improving a business website’s SEO? There are more steps you can take to go above and beyond.
Broken Link Building
About 38% of websites that were up and running a decade ago no longer exist, leading to an uptick in broken links online.
If you come across one and have a link to your site that might work well in its place, email a webmaster and ask them to replace it with your link.
Schema Markup
Schema markup, or structured data, is code on your website’s backend that allows Google and other search engines to crawl your site more effectively. Clean it up so search engines can easily identify what’s on your site.
Implementing Sitemaps
See whether your business website has sitemaps on the back end by looking at the footer of your homepage; if it doesn’t, work to add them. These sitemaps can make life easier on web crawlers and lead to search engines indexing the pages on your site.
Faster Search Engine Indexing
You want Google and other search engines to index your website’s pages sooner rather than later. Make this possible by creating high-quality content, adding internal and external links, and creating a robots.txt file.
Using CDNs
A content delivery network, or CDN, can improve the speed of your business website and lower bandwidth costs. CDN examples include Amazon CloudFront and Google Cloud CDN.
Creating Topical Authority
You’re an expert in your field. Show it off to catch the eye of the search engines and separate yourself from competitors. You can do this by using feedback from customers to generate content and doing market research to find out what your customers want from your company.
Niche Edits for Link Building
Rather than writing guest blogs for other websites, why not see which articles from these sites are already trending and work out an arrangement with webmasters to have your links added to them? It’s an effective link-building strategy.
Creating Location Pages
Whether you own a Trenton, NJ-based law firm or another type of business in a completely different part of the country, you can attract more local clients through local SEO.
While targeting your specific city is key, you should also target the surrounding areas for SEO purposes. Do this by creating location pages for each neighboring city.
Not Ready To Figure Out How To Do SEO Yourself? Get Help With Your SEO Efforts
To see real search engine optimization results, you’ll need to plan to spend more than just a few minutes or even hours figuring out how to do SEO yourself each week. Your time might be better spent tackling other tasks and allowing professionals to take care of your SEO needs.
Let us maximize the investment you make in SEO and help you work on your business rather than in it.
