Search engine optimisation and digital marketing have rapidly grown in both complexity and diversity over the last decade and keeping up with the latest marketing trends and SEO methods is a full-time job in itself. Here at FSE Digital, we provide a complete SEO solution that is tailored to your specific business, which includes technical SEO, onsite SEO, offsite SEO, social media, and PPC. However, if you prefer to manage your SEO strategy yourself, our basic SEO DIY tips will help get you started.
Optimise Your Web Pages First
First and foremost in any marketing campaign is to ensure that your website and all of its pages, or at least, the most important service and product pages, are fully optimised. Whether you are sending organic traffic, social traffic or using paid advertising, if your pages are poorly optimised for receiving traffic, they will fail to convert to new business.
All your services or products should have their own dedicated page that provides a detailed description of the product and a call-to-action. The key to on-site optimisation is to avoid diluting products over too many pages, as this can confuse Google and sometimes cause an SEO over-optimisation penalty.
Analyse Your Competitors
Take time to analyse how your competitors are using their own websites and other digital marketing channels. While you still need to do your own market research and brainstorming, you can quickly get some ideas from what your competitors are doing.
When analysing your competitors, look at the keywords they are using on their pages (in meta titles, headers, and the content), the URL structure, headlines, images and image alts, and other aspects of content. In longer pages, look at the number of words they have on pages and how the content is structured.
Run tests to see if their website is performing better than yours on mobile, and check page speed. These are important ranking factors today, and sometimes the best SEO you can do is simply making your website better than your competitors.
Examine your competitor’s linking strategy – sometimes you can beat your competitors simply by doing the same thing that they have done, but better. Look at the number of links they have, and the type of links – are they using industry blogs, forums, social media pages, news sites, or other types of links? The best links are often those that are on the most relevant industry websites, and a quick phone call or email can get your site listed alongside (or ideally, above) your competitor.
Review Your Online Presence
In the past, we talked about links, but today a more important factor is web presence. Links are still important, but you need to also look at other factors such as how dominant social profile pages are, along with appearance in local searches and citations in business directories.
Usually the greater your brand exposure is, the better your business will rank. Get your business “out there” on the Internet.
Look At Competitor Strategy
Deeper competitor analysis can reveal more details of what other businesses are doing to rank well. For each page that you are competing on, carry out some detailed analysis. The key factors to measure are:
- The main keywords
- Total number of words
- Number of times the main keywords are used
- Where in the content the main keywords are used – titles, headers, URLS, body, first paragraph, images alts, boilerplate?
- LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) analysis – apart from keywords, what sort of natural language is used?
- How are meta descriptions written – sales copy or descriptive text?
- Use of images, videos, and other media
- Internal links, external links
- Discussion/comments
- Reviews
- Are there popups?
- Is there a dedicated mobile version of the page? Is AMP used?
- Age of content
This is a lot of information to gather, but by doing so across multiple competing pages you will start to see how and why your competitors are ranking higher than you. This information should then be used to develop a strategy to create an even better website.
DIY SEO is certainly not easy – just like any DIY task, you need to take your time, be patient, and don’t rush the job. If you can do this, you will get great results. If you do not have the time or resources to do the job properly, speak to a digital marketing agency who can help you develop and implement a new digital marketing strategy.