Do you wish you could boost your website’s search engine optimization (SEO), but don’t have the expertise? You don’t need to hire an SEO agency. You can learn to do SEO on your own.
There are plenty of free and cheap tools available to webmasters who want to boost their website SEO and bring in more organic traffic from search. With just a little knowledge and some free time, you can drastically improve your website SEO yourself. Follow these steps to make it happen.
Establish a Baseline
If you want to improve your website’s SEO, you have to know where you’re starting from so you can measure your success later. Start by going to Google Search Console and searching up your website for a report on its search performance. Go to Performance>Search results to see how often viewers come to your site, how long they stay, and more.
Research Keywords
Keyword research is fundamental to successful SEO. Keywords should match your page content and what your page is about. Use a free keyword research tool to find the best keywords for your content. You want keywords with high monthly search volumes (MSVs) and little competition. You can check the competition for a given keyword by googling “allintitle:your keyword” to see how many competitors come up. The more results, the more competitive the keyword.
Create Optimized Content
Once you have some keywords, you need to start creating optimized content for your website. Content is probably the single most important factor search engine algorithms consider when ranking websites. You want to create unique, authoritative, useful content that’s optimized for search.
Choose one or two keywords to use in each piece of content – don’t reuse keywords across multiple pieces of content because you risk cannibalizing your site and hurting your SEO. Use the keyword in the content title and subheadings, and four to six times in the body of the content – once in the first paragraph, once in the last paragraph, and two to four more times in the rest of the body. Don’t force it; your content should read naturally and your keywords should flow right into it.
Tweak Your On-Page SEO
This is where many SEO amateurs may be tempted to turn to the services of an SEO company in Phoenix or their area. On-page SEO includes optimizing your page’s HTML code, which can be intimidating. Update your site’s metadata with your primary keyword for title tags and for your page URL. Update your meta description tag as necessary with a description that uses your primary keyword. You can also include your primary or secondary keyword in your image file name and image alt text.
Build Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO includes links from other sites linking back to yours directly, as well as links when others share your content on social media, and buzz about your brand online. To build off-page SEO, you need to create authoritative, shareable content. You can also get your website listed in relevant business or industry directories, answer questions on sites like Reddit or Quora, or generate posts on your social media linking back to your website content.
Maintain Your Traffic
Once you’ve reached your SEO goals, you need to maintain your hard work. Tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics can help you keep track of the amount of search traffic you’re getting. There are lots of free SEO tools out there – try out different tools until you find one that makes it easy to monitor your website SEO. You should be able to see what is and isn’t working for your website SEO and then make adjustments accordingly, and you should be able to do it in a relatively pain-free manner.
You’ll also have to keep your finger on the pulse of developments in SEO and search engines in general. Sometimes search engines update the criteria they use to rank websites in search, and you’ll need to know about these changes as they arise. It’s a good idea to follow some industry blogs so you’ll know when SEO best practices change and you’ll be able to adjust your own SEO plan accordingly. That way you won’t be taken by surprise by a search engine algorithm update.
Do you want your website to climb the search rankings? You should try learning how to do SEO yourself. Anyone can use simple, free SEO tools to research keywords and more. You’ll be glad you made the effort when more customers start pouring into your website.
