So you want to drive more online visitors to your website or increase your rankings in Google’s search engine but don’t know where to start.

Should you hire an SEO company or go at it yourself? When it comes to search engine optimisation it can be an overwhelming process, but it doesn’t have to be.

An SEO expert or agency can help ensure that when consumers do a web search, your website is one of the first resources to appear in the search results. But prior to paying someone else to help facilitate improved web results, you may want to enlist a few DIY tips yourself to give your SEO a boost.

Here are 10 do-it-yourself SEO tips that small business owners should try before hiring an SEO firm:

1. Start with Personas

Driving more visitors to your site starts with knowing the persona of your ideal buyer and understanding what makes them tick. Why? Because websites are ultimately built for humans and not robots. So dig into their challenges, understand why they buy, and create a customer persona. This will help you to best align your SEO and website strategy so you can get found online by your ideal customer.

To create a customer persona, start by researching your target audience. Gather as much data on them as possible – such as age, gender, income level, and career industry. Also, consider their interests and hobbies to get a better idea of who they are and what drives them. Look at the types of content that resonate with them. You can also talk to your customers directly and ask them questions about their preferences, concerns, and needs. Once you have gathered all the relevant data, analyse it to uncover patterns in customer behaviour that will help you create a detailed persona of your ideal buyer.

2. Plan Your Keyword Research

Before you push up a bunch of content and copy on your website, make sure you plan out your keyword strategy. Keywords are the words or phrases that your target audience searches for when looking for products and services or when trying to solve a problem in search engines like Google and Bing. Search engines, like Google, will match up the most relevant content to the search of their user and provide the most accurate results from websites, blogs, and images.

3. Find Gold in the Long Tail

For a lot of industries, ranking for the most trafficked keywords is highly effective.  At the same time, trying to rank for those highly competitive terms can be a long and costly endeavour. Instead of focusing solely on the most popular keywords, spend some time building out a targeted strategy around relevant long-tail keywords.

Long tail keywords are longer and more specific phrases that search engine users search on when they are closer to making a purchase or finding what they are looking for. Longtail keywords are key to a healthy online growth strategy.

4. Study your Competitors

Once you have your keyword strategy in place, identify the top competitors for each keyword and what they are doing right to get ranked in the good graces of the search engine gods. Keep in mind that while competitive info can help shape your SEO initiatives, be careful not to rely solely on your competitors. After all, your best website conversions will come from those visitors that are best aligned with YOUR ideal buyer.

5. Blog Consistently

Pages on your website don’t change every day. So with Google always looking for new content, blogging is a great way to push up fresh, relevant content for the search engines to index. Remember as you blog, write your content for your ideal buyer and the challenges they face every day. Don’t just load your blog posts with keywords. Again, you’re ultimately trying to connect with people – not search engine robots.   Avoid keyword stuffing, but do select a primary keyword for your post paired with research from Google Trends to give yourself the best chance of your content being discovered. Make sure the keyword appears in the title, body copy, URL, and meta description for the best optimisation of your post.

Avoid keyword stuffing, but do select a primary keyword for your post paired with research from Google Trends to give yourself the best chance of your content being discovered. Make sure the keyword appears in the title, body copy, URL, and meta description for the best optimisation of your post.

Another blogging tip is to use guest blogging in your strategy. Identify influencers and leaders in your space who write quality content and partner with them to create content that links back to your site. This is a great way to boost traffic, shares, and brand equity online.

Lastly, make sure to leverage email marketing to keep your subscribers and followers updated with the content you publish. This is a great way to ensure that your readership audience can easily access and engage with your content in one place.

By focusing on blogging consistently and leveraging other digital channels such as social media, email, and influencer partnerships, you will have the opportunity to create new content for your prospective buyers and drive traffic to your site.  This will also help you build a loyal customer base that values your quality content which, in turn, seeks out your products or services as solutions to their needs.

6. Eliminate Duplicate Content

One of the easiest ways to drop in the rankings and get punished by search engines is to copy content and use it on your site. When Google is presented with the same piece of content in multiple places, it will show only one page and crowd the others out of the search rankings.

The goal of Google and search engines is to push original and relevant content to the top when users search on the terms they are looking for and suppress duplicate content and nonvaluable pages.

Make sure that any content you create for your website is unique and fresh. That way, search engines will recognise the value of it and reward it with higher rankings in the SERPs. Avoid using similar titles and meta descriptions across multiple pages on your site as this could be seen as duplicate content as well. Look out for identical URLs with different capitalizations and trailing slashes, as search engines view them as different pages. Review your website regularly to make sure that all content is unique and valuable to your audience.

7. Use Internal Links

With today’s heightened focus on content, internal linking is a great strategy to boost SEO. An internal link connects one page of a website to a different page on the same website. By using internal links in your site pages and in blog posts, it improves readability for your visitors, rankings for keywords, and Google’s ability to crawl your site. When you link internally, try to go deep. In other words, don’t just link back to your home page but to pages that are rich in content and relevant to the topic at hand.

Use anchor text that is relevant to the page you are linking to. This helps Google understand what the link is all about and how it contributes to your SEO efforts. Keep your internal links up-to-date as content changes over time so that visitors can find related content that is still relevant and provides them with a better user experience.

When creating content for SEO, internal linking is a great way to increase your search engine rankings. Again, internal links connect one page of your website to another page on the same site and can help you show Google which pages are important and should be ranked higher in search results.

Linking deeper into your site by adding relevant anchor text will also help you to rank for more specific keywords and phrases. It’s also relevant to keep your internal links up-to-date with new content so that visitors have an easy time navigating your website and finding information relevant to them.

8. Use SEO Friendly URLs

Making sure your URLs are clean and optimized is an important DIY tip if you want to rank highly on SERPs (search engine results pages). URLs are simply the address of a unique page on your website that directs online users to your site. When building URLs for your website, it’s important to make sure they are friendly, easy to read for online visitors, and include relevant words (keywords) that correlate to the copy on the page of the website.

9. Optimise for Mobile

More and more people are using their mobile devices to search online which means it can be a major source of traffic and conversions for your business. To optimise your website for mobile, you can ensure that all the content of your pages is responsive. Responsive web design (RWD) means that the content adjusts according to the device size on which it’s being viewed.

Also, make sure you include buttons and links in an easily clickable size. And don’t forget about adding a search bar so visitors can find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Another key factor for optimising for mobile is ensuring that all images on your site are optimised for the device being used. Make sure images are compressed and displayed in the correct size so they don’t take too long to load or are larger than necessary.

10. Use Landing Pages

A landing page is a stand-alone page on your website where visitors land from sources such as search engines, PPC, social, and email marketing. It is a great tool to drive focused traffic to your site and optimize conversions from searches. Most landing pages typically use a form to capture and convert visitors. When creating landing pages in WordPress don’t forget to optimise for SEO with your keywords and use relevant content with a specific call to action (CTA). By using compelling headlines, captivating visuals, and an inviting CTA button, your landing page should be set up for success.

Also, think about the user experience when creating a landing page – make sure it’s not too long or complicated. You can use A/B testing to measure two versions of the same page in order to determine which one performs better with visitors. This way you can identify what works best for your audience and optimise accordingly.

You can also create specific landing pages for each campaign so that you have more control over who visits your site and how they interact with it. This will allow you to track conversions more accurately and analyze visitor behaviour on these pages as well. You can create powerful landing pages that drive conversions by leveraging different elements such as lead capture forms, personalised offers, and compelling copy.

The DIY tips provided here are designed to give you a solid foundation to help you build an effective SEO strategy and get found online. However, depending on your industry’s competitiveness and your business’s resources, you may want to reach out to a consultant to help you along the path. For more assistance with your SEO, visit our services page or book a free 30-minute discovery call. Click here to book your call!