How To Get Started With Doing Your Own SEO
A Small Business Owner’s Guide to DIY SEO
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is a process most businesses can benefit from, but it can be cost prohibitive, especially for small businesses.
We see a lot of mystery around this type of digital marketing, and unfortunately with that comes a lack of transparency, a lack of accountability to results, and sadly a wastage of client marketing budgets.
While SEO can be quite profitable for marketing agencies due to the on-going monthly retainer nature of the engagement, what is often not talked about is that small business owners can do some basic SEO themselves, in order to grow their website traffic.
While the strategies and tools recommended below might not necessarily push you onto the first page of Google for competitive keywords, it can assist in helping you start that journey of crawling up the ranks, and it may even result in additional traffic. Worst case scenario, you’ve set up the foundations for SEO professionals to take over and lead the growth from there.
If you don’t have time to read the whole article on How to Get Started with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) here’s a quick recap:
- Google Analytics. Get it installed to monitor traffic growth.
- Keyword Research. Jump on Google to find semantically related keywords.
- Backlinks. Create a basic backlink profile on some of the most common sites.
- Social Media. Use social media to build social proof and drive traffic to your content.
- Content. Continuously create blog posts and other website content to help with traffic growth.
- Long-term Investment. Be consistent. SEO is a long-term investment of your time and effort.
Search Engine Optimisation Tips For Those Wanting to DIY.
Whether you’re just starting out with your business (congratulations by the way) or you’ve been in the game for a while but only now are looking to get going with SEO, there’s really no better time.
Search Engine Optimisation is so important for your business, but the reality is it takes some time, so the sooner you get started the sooner you’ll start ranking higher. People also don’t really drop out of the SEO games once they’re in it, so your competition is only increasing daily. Today is a good day for SEO and we’re glad you’re here.
Things to consider when getting your business started with SEO:
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Google Analytics
It is indispensably important that you set up a website analytics tool with your website. Google Analytics is the most widely used and effective website analytics tool on the globe, and you can easily link your site to start receiving data on your audiences today. You can see what search terms, keywords and pathways people took to get to and through your site. Google Search Console is also an important aid to your site for SEO opportunities. It gives your business insight directly from Google about how your website interacts with the search engine, checking for errors, broken pages, and indexing issues. Additionally, you will receive messages from Google notifying you about these issues, as well as hacks and malware attacks.
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Keyword Research
Using analytics tools allows you to start the first step of improving your site, by researching keywords which are relevant to your business. The reason behind this research is to gain insight into what your consumers are typing in their search engine to get to your site. It is important to know the competition for that keyword, and the frequency it is searched. Find keywords with low to medium competition with high search rates, and utilise these keywords in your webpage titles, tags, and content to benefit from some of that traffic.
Here’s a hot tip, type your main focus keyword into Google image search, and look for the related keywords that pop up along the top of the results page. These are your semantically related keywords and help you include more relevant phrases into your content.
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Backlinks
Backlinks are great for gaining new, relevant traffic to your site. There are many techniques to doing so, including posting on blogs with new creative content related to your business, linking your site at the end, posting on forums, and connecting to directory listing sites. All these tactics can help bring interested consumers to your site.
Backlinks also form a connection between the site posting the link, and yours. Google sees this connection as a positive relationship and ranking signals. Getting a backlink from a website like the BBC, or the New York Times, would see your authority with Google rise tremendously, and as a result, your rankings.
For an updated list of backlinks that you can easily register for yourself, check out our 2024 Backlinks Guide for Small Businesses. These are a must have.
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Social Media
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc., etc.. There’s always a new social media platform to hit the marketing and business world and it is very important that your business has a footprint on these. Some channels will be more relevant than others depending on your product or service, but the benefits from social media activity remain the same. You can generate plenty of backlinks, increase your direct communication avenues with clients and potential customers, and hype your business through ‘online’ word-of-mouth networking, usually highly effective. This all contributes, again, to detouring traffic to your site.
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Content
Never be satisfied with the amount of content on your site. Whatever your business is, consumers are hugely receptive to new information and constantly try to find out facts about everything, on the web. Creating fresh and interesting articles and guides keeps your website up-to-date and gets customers familiar with your services, whilst you write about your industry at large. Including editorial content on any website, increases your approval from Google, whose algorithms decide on what business is showcased where on the search results page (SERP).
Be consistent in your content creation. It will take time to build up an audience.
Looking for blog posting content ideas? Have a look at your competitor websites, and social media profiles. See which posts they pin on top, or the ones they tend to share on socials. These are likely the ones driving the most amount of traffic to their site.
Replicate a blog post using the same title, but expand on the subject matter with a bigger word count, and include more pictures or videos than your competitor.
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Long-term Investment
SEO comes at a cost, and if you want a strategy that works you’ll likely have to pay a premium. While SEO will be a long-term game, and you should be prepared for that, before you start seeing real, tangible and quantifiable results. Despite that, search engine optimisation is one of the best digital marketing investments you can make at the moment. The high purchasing intent of organic search traffic makes it one of the most valuable sources of site visitors.
Developing a system that will consistently feed you a predictable supply of new leads, is the peace of mind every business owner wants.
Using proper analytics tools, tracking and measuring your digital performance, it will be quite easy to demonstrate the benefits and importance of SEO to you.
How To Get Started With SEO – Our Guide
We hope our short, but concise, guide on how to get started with SEO is sufficient for you to get your toes wet. We hope it starts an exciting journey that’ll lead you to explore what benefits it can have for your business. SEO is important and if you can profit from people finding your website on Google you should have some sort of SEO service in place.
If you don’t have the time to look after your own site’s ranking, call us in to look after it.
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About the Author - 3am Ideas
3am Ideas is digital marketing agency focussing on providing data-driven services that get measurable and trackable results.
Based in Perth, Western Australia, we've been looking after small and medium-sized businesses since 2014, having worked with clients all over the country.
Our aim is to adopt the role of Virtual Marketing Officer for you, becoming part of your team, sharing in the successes, the blood, sweat and tears.
We're here for you. Let's get the job done!