Daily Archives: February 2, 2022

How To Do SEO Yourself? | All Secrets Revealed

How To Do SEO Yourself

The best option to bag high search rankings for your website is hiring an SEO agency. However, many small business owners may not have the budget or time to consult an expert. It leaves you with questions like, can I do SEO myself, and if yes, how to do SEO yourself!

Yes, DIY SEO is very much possible, given you know the right hacks. These include quality link building, off-site and on-page SEO, and catering to its technical aspects like site audit and structure. Sounds challenging?

Don’t worry, as this post has you covered with all the SEO tips you need for getting a high rank on the search results page.

What is SEO? Why Is It Important?

Before getting to the exciting part of how to do search engine optimization yourself, here’s a gist of what it is.

SEO refers to conducting a few on-site and off-site practices to help your website rank well on the results page of search engines like Google. Boosting your website ranking will help your site get organic traffic, increasing your lead conversion rate.

How To Do SEO Yourself

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It is a crucial part of website content marketing as it enhances your site’s visibility. Other SEO benefits include:

  • Targets high-quality traffic, i.e., only those willing to learn more or buy your product or service
  • It is an ad-free approach to marketing
  • Individuals trust organic search results more than paid ones
  • When your website offers quality content (a part of SEO), it enhances the user experience
  • It is a long-term content marketing strategy

How to Learn SEO At Home? 8 Search Engine Optimization Tips

Now that you are well aware of the importance of search engine optimization let’s dive into how to learn SEO at home!

Trust me, once you have these hacks right, it’s easier than you think.

Know Your Target Audience

It all starts with creating an SEO strategy. However, you can only construct a winning strategy once you know who you are targeting.

Begin by creating the persona of your ideal customer. Consider their demographics like age, income, gender, and lifestyle. Doing this will help you understand your buyers’ challenges and search intent. Based on this information, create a website that conveys the solution they are looking for.

How to define your target audience

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For example, if your customer is a middle-class working male looking for formal wear, that’s what your product ages must offer. A budget-friendly range of formal wear for men. Once you know the buyer’s search intent, you can easily look for the relevant keywords.

Conduct Thorough Keyword Research

Whether you’re doing it yourself or hiring an SEO specialist, keyword research is one of the most important SEO tasks. Major search engines like Google consider this an essential ranking factor. Why is it crucial, you may wonder?

Adding the relevant keywords will help your blogs, website pages like the landing page, product pages, and other new pages rank higher than other websites.

So, how to go about keyword research while DIY SEO? It’s easy! You can use a keyword research tool to spot the words most used by your ideal customers. However, here are a few concepts you must keep in mind.

How to do keyword research

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  • Primary Keyword: It is the main keyword your competitors use to rank high. However, avoid keyword stuffing, i.e., using it in areas where it doesn’t fit naturally. It is a negative ranking factor and can harm your site ranking.
  • Long-tail Keyword: Adding specific terms to your primary keywords can significantly boost your rankings.

For example, if your primary keyword is ‘formal male shirt,’ a long-tail keyword will be ‘formal male shirt grey.’ Adding a specific size or colour to the name will help your product pages rank higher.

Leverage Analytics for Rankings

Analytics lets you monitor your website’s organic search traffic. You can see the keywords that direct your customers to your website. Tools like Google Analytics help you recognize patterns that your visitors use. Besides, it’s a free tool.

How analytics help SEO

For example, in the given image, the tool lets you track current and new users along with the channels driving visitors.

If you have a business page, conducting analytics can help you gain insights on:

  • Visitor data like demographics
  • Bounce rates
  • Page views
  • Visitor behaviour at every CRM step

With this, you can gauge whether your marketing campaign is successful and the aspects making it work. At the same time, it lets you spot the gaps between your current approach and the one used by your target audience. Leverage these insights to improve your DIY SEO strategy.

Get Your On-Page SEO Right

If you’re wondering how to do technical SEO at home, don’t worry. All the essential technical knowledge you need to beat the search engines and rank well is right here.

  • Title Tag: The title tag tells search engines what the blog post or page on your website is about. These tags must be 50-70 characters long and preferably contain the primary keyword.
  • Meta Description: As the name states, meta descriptions are brief narratives of what your content pages contain. These few lines comprise the primary keyword, are ideally 140-160 characters long and tell the search engines about the page’s content.

Here’s how a title tag and a meta description look like.

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  • Internal Links: Link building is not all about quality backlinks. Internal links help tell the search engines more about your website content and what other web pages include.
  • Header Tags: Like title tags, header tags are HTML codes around your H1, H2, and H3. Every page must have only one H1 tag and multiple subheadings for a skimmable site structure. It must also comprise the primary keyword. Here’s how the H1 tag of this page looks like.

<H1> How To Do SEO Yourself: All Secrets Revealed</H1>

Other essential aspects of on-site SEO include alt tags and image tags, i.e., naming the images on your page. Additionally, local SEO can help your business site rank for location-specific search queries.

Off-Site SEO

Now that you have a basic understanding of on-site optimization, it’s time for off-site SEO. Essentially, it is all about link building, i.e., gaining backlinks to your page from credible sources. The more links your webpage has, the more search engines will trust it.

Check out the different ways of link building:

  • Organic: These are links that you earn naturally. If your blogs or products are valuable enough, other websites will organically link to them.
  • Whitehat: These are quality links that you can gain through guest posts and reaching out to businesses that can gain value from your content. Other ways include creating quality content like infographics that organically gain backlinks.

Link building tips for DIY SEO

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Note: You can also earn backlinks from blackhat link building, but it’s something you must avoid. Getting links from low-quality or spammy websites hampers your search rankings.

Don’t Forget SEO for Mobile

Almost 54.4% of all website traffic was from mobile devices, making it more than half of the total traffic. Your website must be mobile-friendly to ensure a good user experience.

A few factors that you must consider are:

  • Page speed
  • Text readability from a mobile device
  • Navigation
  • Tap targets spaced suitably

Even Google has rolled out an update for mobile-friendly websites gaining comparatively higher search rankings. Why stay behind!

What is Your Competition Doing?

Another crucial aspect of DIY SEO is studying your competitors. Once you have your keyword strategy right, look at what your competition is using.

Using free tools like SEMrush, Google Trends, and Ubersuggest can give you insights into the top tactics of your competitors. You can learn about the top keyword rankings of your industry, source of organic search traffic and more.

Competitor analysis for SEO

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You can also analyze your competitors’ backlinks and leverage this information to earn more quality links. It’s an essential strategy for your SEO arsenal.

FAQs

Can I Do SEO On My Own?

Yes, you can conduct SEO on your own by understanding the crucial elements of search engine rankings. These include link building, searching for high-ranking keywords and using them in title tags, meta descriptions, and other areas on your content page.

Should I Hire An SEO Specialist?

Yes, hiring an SEO specialist is the best way to rank high in the search results. These experts are well-aware of the technical and non-technical techniques used by search engines for ranking blog posts and web pages. Among other technical information, these specialists will suggest making your site secure through encryption for better ranking.

How Can I Do SEO for Free?

Yes, you can do SEO for free. Tools like Google analytics, MozBar, and WooRank Website Review let you create a free account. What’s next? You can conduct your website audit, analyze competitors’ websites, and get content ideas.

Conclusion

DIY SEO is not as difficult as you may deem it to be. Once you are well-versed with the top-ranking factors, you are good to go. Applying these tactics to your website will help you rank well in search results of the keywords relevant to your website.

Start by creating a content strategy to align your efforts with search engine ranking factors. Include all the essential tactics such as link building, on-page and off-page SEO, studying your audience and the top competitors.

Make your website SEO-friendly

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Amidst all the techniques, don’t forget to focus on content quality. Keyword stuffing and duplicate content can ruin your website SEO. Make sure your content is authentic and valuable.

Now that you know how to learn SEO at home, what’s the hold? Get to work or hire an SEO agency that will ensure your website is well-optimized for search engines.

How Do I Become an SEO Specialist? | A Complete Roadmap

How Do I Become an SEO Specialist

How do I become an SEO specialist? Well, becoming a specialist in this field is no walk in the park. A lot of riding on your skills when a brand trusts you with its SEO strategy.

I know it’s a big decision and I’m here to make sure you feel confident with your choice before taking the plunge into this career path. That’s why I’ve prepared this exhaustive guide to tell you everything you need to know about becoming a technical SEO expert and what it takes to get there.

Let’s get started!

What Is an SEO Specialist?

Let’s start with the basics—what does an SEO specialist do, and why is it important?

SEO specialists offer expertise in all things related to search engines and focus on improving a webpage’s discoverability based on how people search. They analyze the number of visitors clicking through a website, select high-performing keywords, identify relevant search intent, and assess user behaviour to optimize a page for higher SERP rankings—leading to more organic traffic and leads.

But SEO practices don’t just stop at that. Specialists also come up with strategies on how to make the right changes on a website to increase its SEO score.

To put it simply, SEO professionals are like magicians for websites—they can get a webpage out of any jam with the right SEO tools, like Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and then using the insights to make the right changes. These changes could include optimizing content, using link-building tactics, off-page optimization, and more.

Besides creating strategies for businesses and clients, SEO experts also need to know how to execute a given SEO strategy to boost organic traffic. This means staying up-to-date with the latest trends in search engines and knowing what’s going on behind the scenes.

What Is an SEO Manager?

7 Career Paths for SEO Specialists

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If you’re wondering about the difference between a specialist and a manager, let me break it down for you.

The role of a specialist and a manager is fundamentally the same in terms of what they do. But SEO managers are responsible for an additional layer of managerial supervision for all the functions that specialists perform. This includes:

  • Deciding where the specialist(s) will focus their efforts
  • Reporting to upper management about what’s happening with the website’s search engine optimization
  • Ensuring all of the strategies are correctly implemented

In some companies, an SEO manager has to oversee a team of search engine optimization specialists as well as those who work in digital marketing, ​​ including PPC specialists, social media marketers, and content marketing experts. These are just some of the essential responsibilities that SEO managers have.

But, of course, every company has its specific set of duties for every SEO professional, and they can vary from one place to another.

What Are Some Benefits of Being an SEO Specialist?

Now that you know the basics of what an SEO expert does, I want to let you in on some of the benefits that come with this job.

How Do I Become an SEO Specialist

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First and foremost, there’s no limit to where your career can take you. A technical SEO expert can either work at a large company or run their own business. The high demand for SEO skills is evident in the global demand for this role.

Besides the low entry barrier, an SEO expert can find work almost anywhere—which means they can work for a global clientele right from their couch! If you want to live near the beach, work in a big city, or anywhere in between, this career path is perfect for you.

Lastly, an SEO expert is always learning new things about searcher behaviour and digital marketing, which gives them an edge in the job market at large.

How do I Become an SEO Specialist?

With all the benefits of working as a technical SEO professional, you’re probably wondering how you can become an SEO expert yourself. This section will answer all your questions.

1. Take SEO Courses

While you can learn a lot on your own through Google, completing specialized courses is a good place to start building your technical understanding. Most SEO courses are typically free or low-cost, so you’ll not have to worry about a huge investment.

You can learn everything from keyword research and link building to on-page SEO and advanced technical SEO through these comprehensive courses. The more courses you take, the more conceptual clarity you’ll have—and then it’ll be just a matter of putting that into practice.

So, if you haven’t already done so, sign up for courses and start learning!

2. Get Certified

Like any other profession, getting certified is the best way to prove to employers that you can talk the talk and walk the walk. But certifications aren’t as easy to acquire as you might think. They require consistency, decent knowledge, and dedicated effort. So if you get a few, it’ll be proof of your technical proficiency.

How to Get SEO Certified

So you’ve done the hard work, and now you’re ready to get certified and become an SEO expert. But where do you even start?

Search for Certifications

There are a ton of different SEO certifications out there—but they’re not all equal. Some require too much time, effort, and money, while others are much more affordable and doable. So before you start looking for certifications, know what you need to achieve first and do your research accordingly.

Popular certifications include Google Analytics, Google AdWords, and Bing Webmaster Tools. There’s also the Moz SEO Essentials Certification that comes with a price tag but is highly valued in the industry.

Learn What Your Certification Entails

Just because certification is labelled as SEO doesn’t mean that the exam will be all about understanding how search engines work. Some certifications are more about using SEO to your advantage and just SEO basics, while others focus much more on the technical aspects.

Different Paths for SEO

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So, learn more about what you want to get out of your certification and what you need to study for it. Don’t waste time studying for something that won’t equip you with the right skills for the long run.

Prepare for Your Exam and Ace It

Once you’ve finalized the certification(s) you’d like to get, it’s time to focus on the coursework and prepare yourself for the exam. Look for practice tests or study guides for the prep. Read, watch, and listen to relevant content to advance your understanding of SEO.

Study Even After Your Exam

Getting certified is not the end of the line. Once you secure the certificate, it’s time to put theory into practice and gain hands-on experience. If you don’t fully understand the material you just covered, it defeats the point of the certification. So if you really want to prove that you’re a master SEO professional, continue learning and practising.

3. Practice by Doing

One of the best ways to learn the nitty-gritty of SEO is to do more. As an SEO newbie, performing simple tasks and analysis is a great way to test your SEO knowledge. Many people also practice by creating their own websites! Optimize your test website for the search engines and see what’s getting the results. Experiment and tweak things to explore more than what you know.

You can also use tools designed to help you understand what you did wrong and how you could do better. Learn from your mistakes and keep practising—the more you do it, the better you’re going to get!

4. Gain Experience

While getting certified can be a great way to prove how much you know about SEO, it may not be enough in the long run—especially if you really want to become an SEO expert.

When it comes down to getting a job as a specialist or working your way up the content marketing industry, having actual SEO expertise is a must.

But how do you get this valuable experience? Here are some best practices to help you on your quest.

Offer Your Services to Friends and Family

If you have friends or family members running their own business, offer your SEO efforts for free! If you’re worried about getting paid, don’t—just provide your services to get the much-needed experience. This can get you some great referrals, too!

Volunteer or Undertake an Internship

You can also volunteer your time at local organizations or participate in internships to boost your SEO training. Volunteering is great to learn in-depth about SEO while earning experience. Many non-profits will appreciate your help since they don’t have money to hire employees or pay contractors.

Internships, on the other hand, can work wonders to enter into the content marketing field and land you a full-time job first or freelance gig.

Both avenues can help supplement your SEO expertise and get your name out there before it’s time to get paid.

Take on SEO Clients

If you have a sound understanding of what SEO is and how it works—after testing things on your own for a while, it may be time to take the lead in the real world. Start by taking up a few freelance gigs to apply your knowledge and scale your way up as you build a portfolio of work.

Freelance platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, or Freelancer can connect you with people who need SEO assistance. You could also create a website dedicated to SEO tasks and services to help you get your name out there.

Apply for a Job

Once you have some case studies to show for your skills, you’re all set to apply for jobs or start a freelance business.

If you’re looking for a job, try to apply for smaller companies and agencies instead of large ones. Although larger organizations tend to offer much higher pay, they also provide much less room for growth.

In smaller companies, you’ll usually have the opportunity to work your way up from entry-level positions to more senior roles over time—something that those working for big businesses simply won’t be able to do.

5. Boost Your SEO Knowledge

As you dig deeper into the world of SEO, remember that this industry is continuously changing and evolving. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms, so SEO strategies and tips need to be adapted to cater to the latest algorithm updates.

So, what you learned a year ago may not be relevant anymore. If you really want to excel in this field, you’ll need to know more than just how SEO works—you also have to keep abreast with some of its latest developments.

By that logic, you should always be on the lookout for new updates to search engines and improve your proficiency in Google Analytics while putting your skills to the test! For instance, it’s always good to have a couple of top SEO blogs that you follow or news sites to acquaint yourself with the latest updates in the SEO industry.

6.  Network With Others in Your Industry

Lastly, building your network comprising like-minded individuals is always great to scale your career in the search engine market. The simple act of learning more about the industry through constant communication with other professionals should help keep your work fresh and relevant.

Some ways to do this include:

  • Joining social media communities
  • Attending SEO conferences
  • Connecting with SEO experts on LinkedIn and Twitter
  • Following newsletters and blogs from specialists

The more you’re around people doing the same kind of work, the easier it’ll be for you to remain motivated throughout your career! And that’s how to become an SEO expert.

Guide to Becoming an SEO Expert

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Ready to Become an SEO Expert?

Becoming an SEO expert is more than just creating a website and offering services. It’s a long-drawn path that starts with building a strong skillset, completing certifications, and gaining actual experience and results.

Now that you’ve learned more about some of the best ways to become an SEO specialist, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get started. If you’re entering this highly-competitive field, you’ll need to prove your worth and stand out from other professionals offering SEO services.

Make sure you have a clear, defined plan in place before beginning your journey. From there, you’ll also need to dedicate yourself to learning—when it comes to dominating search results, nothing is more essential than hard work.

Good luck and enjoy the ride!