It’s common to hear about the importance of SEO (search engine optimization) – but you aren’t sure what it actually means.
SEO, in short, is all you do online to ensure that your website and all of its pages appear at the top search engine results.
More than 70% of clicks are directed to the first page of Google. Your intended audience will most likely choose to do business with your competitors if you don’t get to the top.
We are certain you would not want this to happen.
How can you improve the SEO score of your website? How can you ensure your website ranks highly in search engine results?
It is important to ask, Is it possible to do-it yourself SEO?
This article will answer all of your questions.
We will show you how to do SEO by yourself. We will also give you information about how to partner with an organic SEO freelancer that will deliver you even faster results.
Understanding Keywords
You need to understand keywords if you want to be able to do your own SEO.
Keywords are terms and phrases users use to search search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo to help them find what they need on the internet.
Each industry, every company, and every online store has certain keywords that their target customers use to search for products or services.
If you’re a florist, keywords like “best florist near me,” “same-day delivery florist” or “flower bouquet delivery Mother’s Day” are key words to help you target your market.
Tools can help you determine the most popular keywords in your industry. It is recommended to incorporate these keywords naturally into your website or blog posts.
This will ensure that your site is visited by those who are most likely to do business with you in a particular way.
Other Keyword Tip
SEO for keywords is the most important aspect you can do to improve your SEO.
It’s not as simple as just putting the top keywords in your blog and waiting for the money to come in.
First, if you are a small florist or a smaller one, big flower shops will use the same keywords and terms that you want to rank for. You’ll get most of the traffic to these keywords, but they’ll also likely get all your traffic. If you focus on ranking for broad keywords such as “florist” and “flower shop”, you’ll be wasting your time.
Consider the keywords that your competitors aren’t using. These keywords could include mentions about your state, city, locality, and even landmarks. You should include any specific services you offer, such as hospital deliveries and special add-ons to your floral arrangements.
You must also be aware of the correct place to put these words.
You can use keywords in the names of image files, headers and article titles, as well as photos captions and URLs.
Understanding Dwell Time
You can improve your rankings by extending your stay on your website, which is how long customers spend on it.
While the primary goal is to get people to visit your site and make a purchase, the second objective will be to keep them there as long as possible.
Why? Sites with longer dwell times rank higher.
Google and other search engines “think” that people spend more time on your website than the average. This is because your site has useful and current information.
What other things could you do that would increase your stay-time.
Start by making sure your website loads quickly. This is an important aspect considering that 40% of website visitors will leave if it takes more than 3 minutes to load.
You can speed up the loading of your website by removing unnecessary plugins, disabling autoplay functions, pop-up ads and browser caching. Also, optimize your images for loading speed.
It is also important to be mobile-friendly, as more people are accessing the Internet via their mobile phones/tablets rather than desktop computers.
Make sure that your buttons are large enough to be pressed with your fingers for mobile users. Also, you should eliminate endless scrolling. You might also consider creating a smartphone version of your website. You should also consider compressing your images and enabling autocorrect/autofill for forms. Also, you should test frequently on mobile devices.
Target Your Local Market
This blog has been primarily about SEO in general.
But, local SEO is just as important. Local SEO is more important depending on your business’s specifics, especially if you provide certain services.
It is important to ensure that your website is visible to the people in your locality.
What are the steps?
First, include references to your business location in your search terms. You don’t have to just list the cities and states where your business is located. But, it will help. Blog posts on local festivals and events, discussion of local topics or links to local businesses (non-competitors, obviously) can all be included in your website’s content.
It is important that you claim third-party listings, such as Google My Business and Yelp, for your business. These listings should include photographs of your shopfront and products, as well as information about transportation options, parking details, payment options, and any other pertinent information.
You should be aware that your listings could be listed by your competitor.
This third-party listing has the best feature: previous customers can leave reviews about you company. It is crucial to give potential customers reviews to help them decide if they want to work with you.
You can also look at these reviews online and respond, regardless of their positive or negative aspects.
Do It Yourself SEO
Let’s take a look at some simple SEO strategies that can help you keep people coming to your site, draw in your market segment, and allow you to rise up the search engine results.
Every page of your website should have a Google Map. This will allow mobile customers to locate your location easily.
To be compatible with voice search, keywords must be optimized. Use a few key phrases that are in the “who, what?, where?, when? Why, how” format. This will be more similar to the questions users might ask voice search devices like Alexa.
Keep your blog updated as often as possible. Search engines will be notified that your blog has been updated. This will give you a higher ranking on search engines.
Add hyperlinks to your Twitter and Facebook accounts to each page, as well as your homepage.
In your most recent blog posts, link back to older blog articles. Only if those posts are relevant to your topic. You should also include links to product or service pages in your blog posts.
To optimize and assess the performance of your website’s site, use the most popular marketing tools.
Are you looking to work with an Organic SEO Specialist?
We hope that you found this Do-it-yourself SEO guide helpful. However, we understand that you may feel overwhelmed.
You might not have the patience or technical skills or the time to create your website and keep it updated with new information.
It is also difficult to think about changes to Google or other search engine algorithms. Google and other search engine algorithms -which are in fact constantly changing – are Google.
It is important to ensure that your company is at the forefront for the latest SEO trends.
Many reasons exist to hire SEO experts. We can help you make this happen.
We can help you with any aspect of SEO, including linking, content creation, management of reputation and other aspects.
Get in touch with us to schedule a free web analysis.
