Last Updated:
As most of you probably know, search engine optimization is the best way to promote an online brand. While the marketing tactic doesn’t provide instantaneous results, it’s fantastic for building your brand the right way. Most importantly, with SEO, you’ll become one of the most authoritative sources within your respective industry, thus boosting all other promotional activities.
Unfortunately, due to its complexity, many entrepreneurs are dissuaded from trying DIY SEO. The digital marketing tactic combines technical SEO, link building, local optimization, and content marketing, each with its own methodology and challenges.
Despite being convoluted, SEO can be done in-house, with minimal outside assistance. Of course, you might have to hire an expert for this or that task, but for the most part, you can manage most activities by yourself. While the first days might be rough, we’ll try to expedite the process with the following tips and tricks.
How does SEO affect your marketing efforts?
Although many website owners know that search engine optimization is important, they don’t understand how much. Aside from the fact that SEO can provide a large amount of organic traffic for your brand, it is also the best converting type of web traffic. While optimization doesn’t necessarily have the highest ROI, its conversion rates are through the roof.
But what’s even more important is that other marketing efforts won’t be as potent without a well-optimized site. Visitors that come from secondary sources, like social media or paid advertisement, will be affected by your web page design, architecture, site speed, and other elements. In other words, as long as you wish to sell online, you’ll need to at least cover the basics.
Performing basic preparations
Given the complexity of this marketing tactic, it isn’t surprising you’ll need some preparation. Being an SEO expert is much harder than you might think, and it requires continuous learning, following the latest trends, and heavy networking.
Set marketing goals
Before you invest any of your valuable time into SEO, you should first determine your business priorities. Optimization is mainly used to accomplish the following objectives:
- Increase web traffic and sales
- Boost brand awareness
- Set basis for other marketing processes
In most cases, companies use optimization to increase their organic traffic, which commonly goes hand-in-hand with increased brand awareness. Implementing the best SEO practices will also have a major impact on other marketing activities. Whether you’re using affiliate marketing, social media marketing, or some other tactic, you’ll need to have a highly functional site to convert all the incoming visitors.
SEO is usually done in perpetuity. Google and other search engines make changes to their algorithms all the time, so you’ll have to update your website’s SEO content and elements every once in a while. By understanding your goals, you’ll know how much money you need to allocate to these activities, as you shouldn’t overspend on optimization unless it’s your primary source of traffic.
Read the biggest SEO blogs
This blog post is a great starting point if you wish to learn more about optimization. In the following chapters, we’ll explain different processes and how to implement them into your workflow. Nevertheless, we also suggest that you read other articles on the web to have an even better understanding of this marketing tactic.
Some of the best publications in this field are Search Engine Land, Content Marketing Institute, Ahrefs, SemRush, Moz, Search Engine Journal, Backlinko, and, of course, Google’s official blog. While you shouldn’t necessarily focus on the latest news, going through various ultimate guides should teach you about different processes and methodologies.
Install SEO tools
SEO is an analytical process that relies on lots of real-time data. That being said, you’ll need quite a few analytics tools in your arsenal. Luckily, the basic ones are free, and they will slowly introduce you to general terminology and how things work.
For the purpose of this article, we’ll explain how to set up Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Google Search Console
- Sign in with your official company Google account
- Add property type
- Verify the site via URL or domain property, either by using Google Analytics code or asking Google to generate HTML code
Google Analytics
- Create an account
- Set up website property
- Create a Reporting view, which would allow you to filter data
- Insert site tracking code, thus allowing data collection
Bing Webmaster Tools
- Set up an account while being logged into Google, Bing, or Facebook
- Add your website
- Verify proprietorship via meta tag or XML file authentication or by adding a CNAME to DNS
Most people focus on Google Analytics and Google Search Console because they give you insights about a site’s performance within Google. However, Bing Webmaster Tools can be every bit as beneficial for your brand as an auxiliary platform.
With these three tools, you can track your search engine rankings, different traffic categories, as well as user behavior on the site. Google Search Console can also assist you with a few technical SEO issues and can ensure that search engine crawlers properly see your pages. On the other hand, Google Analytics can be utilized for paid advertising.
Secondary tools
While the previous three tools are great in their own regard, and you’ll use them throughout your SEO journey, you’ll also need other programs. For example, you’ll likely need something like Ahrefs to track your external and internal links, and Screaming Frog will allow you to perform an SEO audit.
Here are a few things that you can do with top-tier marketing tools:
- Analyze traffic for relevant search queries
- Generate and optimize your written content
- Edit and create videos and images
- Build and monitor links
- Improve and track your online reputation
- Boost website speed and improve mobile-responsiveness
- Generate more secondary traffic
Keep in mind that every software has its proprietary algorithm, and the differences between them can be rather stark. As a newbie, you likely won’t know which tool is optimal for your brand, so we suggest you ask around before committing. In the end, even if you try to test them, you likely won’t understand what makes one platform better than another.
Introduce secondary channels
Whether you like it or not, you’ll likely need secondary channels for boosting brand awareness and website traffic, as well as for building relationships. Here’s how other tactics and channels can boost your placement within search engine results pages:
Social media
Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are must-haves for any online brand. Given that search engines are starting to focus on user engagement metrics more and more, you can make quite an impact by driving loyal fans to your blogs. That way, you can indirectly boost metrics like bounce rate and time spent on a page without relying on organic traffic.
Of course, social platforms can also do wonders as a separate traffic and sales source. Building a presence on these sites will mitigate the common DIY SEO risks and provide a second option if you ever dip in Google search results. Make sure to add widgets on your site to allow easier sharing!
Paid search
There is an interesting dynamic between search engine optimization and Google paid search. By investing in both strategies, you can occupy several slots for relevant keywords in your industry. That way, you double the chance that someone will click on your link and visit your product pages.
As previously mentioned, you need well-optimized pages for PPC to make sense. When visitors land on your site, they want to have an impeccable browsing experience. Otherwise, you probably won’t be able to convert them into paying customers.
While many people perceive paid search as mostly a sales method, it can also have a major impact on your organic results. If a person clicks on your ad, this is a clear sign they’re interested in page content. So, when they land on a page, they will likely engage with it, sending a strong relevancy signal to Google.
Email marketing
Similar to social media, email marketing is a good way to boost your traffic and sales. The tactic is fantastic for new blogs that have gained any traction in search engines. Many companies also use it during link-building campaigns to attract attention to a specific piece of content.
Affiliate marketing
Lastly, we’d like to briefly touch on affiliate marketing. With it, you can boost your DIY SEO by sending relevant traffic to your pages. In most cases, these visitors convert into buyers, so besides marketing perks, you can also boost your bottom line.
Create an internal team
If you’re doing DIY SEO, you’ll likely want to execute as many tasks as possible by yourself. However, the reality is that you’ll likely have to hire a few guys to help you out (whether part-time or full-time).
Here are a few things you might need assistance with:
- Website design and optimization
- Content creation, editing, and optimization
- Link-building and other promotional activities
- Reputation management
- Secondary marketing activities
Your internal team structure and organizational needs might vary depending on the size of a company. Since smaller brands mostly do DIY SEO, your best bet is to outsource other marketing professionals and communicate with them online. That way, you can reduce the expenses for rent, utility, pensions, and other things.
The MiroMind team suggests that you use UpWork to find elite freelancers. As the biggest platform of its kind in the world, UpWork has a vast selection of professionals from every marketing field.
5 Steps of common DIY SEO process
While SEO might seem chaotic to someone who has little experience, the process is actually highly structured. There is an optimal way of doing things, where you tackle tasks one by one. After setting the basis through technical SEO and learning more about your target audience, you need to create pages and promote your content.
Here are 5 main steps you’ll go through when optimizing your website!
1. Create a site and perform technical optimization
Nowadays, most website designers perform full site optimization while creating a site. Among others, they’ll introduce optimal layouts for users and search engine crawlers, optimize images and other elements, and ensure that the site properly opens on different devices.
But truthfully, you don’t need outside assistance for this task! There are so many simple drag-and-drop website builders that come with built-in SEO tools. You can use platforms like Wix and Squarespace to create a site from scratch, optimize it for search engines, and even host it without incurring additional fees.
Most of them come with premade templates that you can utilize as the basis. After that, you can use drag-and-drop functionality to tweak the placement of images and texts. The best thing yet is that you don’t need to know HTML or anything about coding; modern website builders are quite intuitive and geared toward newbies.
Technical SEO for existing site
If you already have a working site and wish to audit it, things are a bit different. You can use tools like Google Search Console and Screaming Frog to check the platform for potential penalties and potential errors. Among others, you need to focus on the following:
- Crawlability
- Security
- Site performance
- Internal linking
- Core Web Vitals
- Schema Markup
- Errors and warning
- Content optimization
Auditing an existing site can be tricky in some cases especially if you were hit by a black-hat attack. In these cases, you’ll have to deal with all sorts of issues and communicate with Google’s team to remedy the issue. If this is your case, we suggest you hire a professional who has experience with audits to fix the problem as soon as possible.
2. Perform keyword research and learn about user intent
Once you’ve set the basis, it’s time to perform extensive keyword research to find target keywords for your blog. After that, you need to figure out how each term is used by website visitors and what they actually interested in when they type in a particular query.
Keyword research
It’s worth noting that the process will vary depending on the software you’re using, although just slightly. Here’s what the process would look like with Ahrefs, one of the more popular software for this particular task:
- First, you need to think about a few keyword ideas. Focus on seed keywords, that is, general phrases used in your industry (i.e., “maxi dress,” “used cars,” and “toys for girls”)
- Type in your seed keyword into the search and go down the list. Focus on phrases that have low difficulty coupled with high search volume
- Alternatively, you can type in the names of similar-sized competitors and check what they’re ranking for. In theory, your brand should also be able to rank for these phrases, as you have similar authority and resources as the other brand
- Once you create a list of lucrative phrases, check each primary keyword for its CPC (cost-per-click). Phrases that are expensive to advertise usually have higher commercial intent and would result in more sales. This is a good method for diversifying between quality keywords and those that just look good on paper
- Check the first page of Google for each phase. If there are too many strong competitors, it will be hard to penetrate the query. The same goes if there are too many brand-related results
Search intent
Figuring out the search intent is the second phase of keyword research. You should be smart to remember that each phrase has its purpose and that people are looking for different type of content when they place these phrases into search engines.
Four categories of keywords, based on search intent, include:
- Informational
- Navigational
- Commercial
- Transactional
With informational phrases, users are usually looking for articles that would extend their knowledge of a topic. While these phrases are easier to optimize for, they usually won’t boost your sales.
Navigational phrases refer to brand names. People use these terms when they’re looking for a specific brand or product. You should organically rank for your own brand name, although you won’t get much value ranking for other company’s brand names (as this isn’t what users are looking for).
Website users type in commercial phrases when they’re browsing a commercial topic. These are usually “Product A vs. Product B” articles and product reviews.
Transactional phrases are the most lucrative but also the hardest to rank. These are terms that consist of words like “cheap” or “buy.” People use them when they’re close to executing a business transaction.
3. Create engaging content
Unless you’re really good with words, we suggest you don’t write your own articles. Not only should these posts be well-written, but they also need to follow the best optimization practices. Still, if you’re willing to give it a go, here are a few secrets you need to follow:
- Before you start writing a new piece, it’s vital that you check the top-ranking articles. You can learn a lot about ideal formats and topics by simply going through the best-ranked web pages. For the most part, you should emulate these posts and build upon them
- Introduce as many statistics and other relevant information as possible. Expert opinions are also fantastic as they add to the article’s authority and quality
- Create a unique voice for your brand to separate yourself from competitors
- Think about the article from the perspective of your SEO strategy. Interlink it with other posts and use it as a part of funnels and clusters
- Break down the post with bullets, numbers, images, paragraphs, quotes, and similar tricks. Readers should easily skim through different areas and find answers to their questions. You should also consider adding a table of contents on the top with live links
Given that everything revolves around articles, they will be crucial for your organic search performance.
Optimizing content with tools
Creating quality content is just the first step. You also need to optimize each piece so it’s more likely to appear on top of Google.
Grammarly is a tool you can’t live without. As the name suggests, it allows you to check for various writing mistakes in your articles. The newer version of the product also comes with an AI generator that can help during writer’s block. Still, we wouldn’t recommend AI tools for extensive content creation.
Surfer SEO, MarketMuse, and Frase are also solid, and you’ll likely use one of them during your SEO journey. These programs tell you how many and which keywords you need to add to individual posts. Not only will this make articles more relevant for search engines, but will also prevent keyword stuffing.
4. Build quality external links
If you wish to learn SEO, you also need to learn various methods of acquiring links from other sources. Not only do these links boost your direct traffic, but they can also affect an article’s placement in results.
The simplest way to acquire good links is through guest posting. Basically, you can ask other website owners to publish posts on their blogs in return for fresh links. They get new pieces without having to pay content writers, and you get a slight boost to your relevant pages.
Another cool method is organic outreach. With it, you connect with other bloggers and ask them to link to your page. However, for this method to work, the article needs to be of good quality, as linking websites don’t want to promote lousy pieces.
It’s worth mentioning that not all links are the same. While you should strive to accrue as many hyperlinks as possible for your blog, you should pay attention to where they’re coming from. Low-quality links from suspicious sites might harm your entire domain without providing any value in return.
5. Set up local SEO
Almost any company can benefit from local optimization, although this process is much more beneficial for small service providers. So, if you have a bar, restaurant, beauty salon, or car mechanic shop, you might benefit from local SEO more than traditional optimization.
Setting up local optimization isn’t that hard:
- Create a Google My Business account
- Fill in the info, including your physical address, working hours, phone, email, and other data
- Add your website to various online websites registered while using the same information across the board
- Create articles revolving around relevant local keywords
- Start accruing reviews
Your ability to rank for local queries depends mostly on the number and quality of reviews. Highly ranked businesses will appear at the top of Google Three Pack, which would ensure much more search traffic for commercial phrases in their city.
For this to work, you don’t need technical knowledge. All you need to do is be polite toward your clients, offer fantastic service and products, and ask them for positive reviews.