Best 11 Do-It-Yourself SEO Tips to Save Money | Beginners’ Guide To SEO
Search engine
optimization takes time and money. If you’re short on time but have the money,
an agency or consultant is an option. If you’re short on money, use these
do-it-yourself tips to boost your site’s organic rankings.
1. Improve Title Tags
Look at your highest-level category pages. My research shows
that ecommerce category pages should drive up to 32-percent more organic search traffic than product pages.
Sometimes a small,
common-sense tweak to a title tag can make a big difference, especially if your
ecommerce platform generates default titles based on the labels in your taxonomy
and the site’s name. This can result in title tags such as “Women’s – [Your
Site].”
Do your title tags
make sense? Can you make them more specific or relevant? For example, adding
“shoes” to the title tag above could be a common-sense tweak: “Women’s Shoes –
[Your Site].”
2. Master Keyword Research
A sound SEO program relies on keyword research to:
·
Know the words and
phrases of real searchers,
·
Determine which keywords
to target,
·
Gauge demand for your
products.
Marketers tend to use
the jargon of their industry and brand. Don’t assume that you know what
consumers want and how they search — do the research.
The best keyword tools offer a demand score for each theme. Google Keyword Planner is the free, go-to keyword research tool, though you’ll
need an active Google Ads campaign to access the most useful data.
Most other quantitative
keyword tools require a paid subscription. But some still suggest keywords, for
free, without providing data on popularity.
Google Ads Keyword Planner is a free research
tool. You’ll need an active Google Ads campaign to access it, however.
3. Understand Your Competition
Identify your organic-search competitors —
not necessarily the sites that sell exact products and services, but also
informational sites and massive retailers that compete for the same phrases.
Wikipedia, Vogue magazine, and Walmart are your competitors if they’re taking
up room on the search results page. Ask yourself:
·
What are they doing
well in organic search?
·
What content themes do
they include that you don’t?
·
How do they structure
their site to target valuable keywords?
·
How do they engage
shoppers?
Also, study their
reviews and social media activity to identify products or site info that could
improve your own offerings and user experience.
4. Map Keywords
Knowing what consumers
want and the search phrases they use, map keywords to each page on your site.
Create a spreadsheet
of all critical pages in your site’s navigation and map unique primary and
secondary keywords to each. Create new pages for unassigned high-value
keywords.
Use long-tail keyword themes that drive fewer searches and are typically more specific
— such as “how to get red wine out of carpet” or “ex9116 exalt 18v battery
charger” — in blog posts,
FAQ pages, and product pages.
5. Optimize Your Site
With your keyword map
in-hand, the next step is implementing on-page SEO, including:
·
Updating the content
on the pages to include the keywords;
·
Creating new pages
(for unassigned keywords) with text and, potentially, graphics, audio, and
video;
·
Launching a new,
keyword-rich section, such a blog or education portal.
Focus on the relevance of the textual elements of each page — the title tags, meta
descriptions, headings, body content — to the keyword themes that searchers
use.
6. Produce Regular Relevant Contents
Create ongoing content tailored to your audience. You don’t have
to kick out a new blog post or other content every day. That’s unrealistic for
many ecommerce sites. Just publish unique content at
least monthly,
if not weekly. Consistency is key.
“Content” does not
need to be only text. Use illustrations, product photos, how-to videos, or any
other content that helps shoppers. Delivering value is vital. If the content
doesn’t fill a need or engage your customers and prospects, you’ve wasted your
time and theirs.
7. Boost Link Equity
Link equity is the quantity of high-quality, topically-relevant
sites that link to yours. Link equity and contextual relevance are the top two
organic ranking factors. Combined, link acquisition and content marketing increase your link equity naturally.
Content marketing for
SEO involves creating, say, articles, videos, and podcasts that people want to
share and link to. As the number of people exposed to the content increases, so
does the potential for links.
Link acquisition, on
the other hand, involves:
·
Identifying high-value
pages or sites that are topically relevant;
·
Figuring out how to
make your content valuable to that site owner; and
·
Reaching out directly
to request a link or an arrangement that would lead to a link, such as a guest
post or interview.
Google advises site owners to build compelling websites that
users want to tell their friends about. This content-engagement approach to SEO
is Google’s answer to, “How do I get more links ethically?”
The keyword research
in step 2, above, comes in handy as it provides an idea of the most influential
and best-ranking sites to approach.
8. Build Your Social Media Network
Social media enables you to connect with your audience. Nurturing those
relationships increases the exposure of your content and, thus, the likelihood
that some will blog about it or link to it.
Consumer-facing
businesses will likely find the most value in Facebook and Twitter. B2B
companies usually focus on Twitter and LinkedIn, with Facebook in the mix as
well.
If you have attractive images, add Instagram or
Pinterest to the list. If you’re open to creating videos, definitely use
YouTube.
9. Understand Analytics
You can’t optimize what you don’t measure. SEO requires a basic
understanding of Google Analytics (or equivalent) to know which pages to optimize and which
are performing strongly.
In Google Analytics, go to Acquisition > All Traffic
> Channels. Click on “Organic Search” and then change the Primary Dimension to “Landing Page.” You can then
analyze your SEO performance.
Beware of the “Keyword” dimension, though. No analytics program
can accurately track which keywords referred
organic search traffic to your site. Only the analytics for each search engine,
such as Google Search Console’s Performance report, can do that.
10. Read SEO Posts
Study an SEO guide such as my “SEO How-to”
series. Other helpful and free beginner SEO guides include Moz’s “The Beginner’s Guide to SEO,” Search Engine Land’s “Guide to SEO,”
and Google’s “Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.”
For quick updates on SEO changes, try two YouTube channels:
Moz’s “Whiteboard Friday” and “Google Webmasters.”
Also, read trusted SEO blogs.
11. Ask Questions
If you are stuck, ask questions in one of the many SEO
communities. Google’s Webmaster Forum is a helpful place to start. Participants include Google
employees, SEO professionals, marketers, and developers. Other popular forums
are WebmasterWorld Forum and Moz’s Q&A Forum.
Facebook and LinkedIn also have SEO
communities.
Twitter is a popular
vehicle to ask the SEO community for advice. Make sure to include a hashtag
such as #seo, #seoquestion to increase your chances of being seen by someone
who can help.
Never forget, however,
that there’s a lot of SEO misinformation. Try to vet the source.
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