Is DIY SEO Difficult?

DIY search engine optimization isn’t all that difficult if you have an understanding of what search engines are looking for and a proven process that manages your SEO strategy.

My goal is to provide you with a step by step process you can use to start increasing your rankings starting today.

I will provide you with the 3rd party tools and the processes I use to help my clients claim first page rankings on Google, Bing, Safari and other popular search engines consumers use on a daily basis.

SEO SaaS Tools Professionals Use

To be honest, there are really only 3 DIY SEO SaaS tools to consider purchasing if you are serious about outranking your competition. These 3 SEO SaaS tools are SEMRush, Moz and Ahrefs.

I personally have used all 3 tools, but my personal preference is SEMRush. I feel like SEMRush has done a great job with the user interface and makes it easy to manage your SEO strategies and processes.

However, this isn’t a promotion for SEMRUsh and each SaaS tool gives you a free trial. I suggest giving them all a try to see which one meets your needs the best.

How Healthy Is Your Website?

The one thing all high ranking websites have in common is they meet the technical SEO requirements of Google.

Using your preferred SaaS tool, simply run a technical SEO audit on your website to see any issues that may be keeping your website from ranking as high as it should.

In SEMRush, technical SEO issues are broken down by errors, warnings and notices and your health score is rated on a scale of 0 to 100 with 100 being the healthiest.

From my experience, most websites that haven’t received a site audit receive a health score of under 70.

However, the best part is, a majority of website health issues are fairly simple to fix and can easily be fixed with little to no knowledge of SEO.

Some of these issues include missing title tags, missing descriptions, duplicate content and broken external and internal links.

On the other hand, some websites may encounter more technical issues like slow page speed, canonicalization and JavaScript errors that may require a web developer or experienced SEO expert to address.

It’s essential to get your websites health score as high as possible because it is the foundation of your website and the most important ranking factor when search engines crawl your website.

How To Find The Right Keywords

Once you have a healthy website, it’s time to start researching keywords your target audience is searching for.

Using the SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool, I start my keyword research by typing in the keyword that best describes what my website or business is about.

For this example the keyword I am researching is Minneapolis SEO Consultant. As you can see from the image below, the number one keyword my consumers are researching when looking for SEO services in Minneapolis is SEO Consultant Minneapolis.

SEO Consultant Minneapolis Keyword Research

The keyword SEO Consultant Minneapolis has a search volume of 320 searches a month and a Keyword Difficulty (KD %) of 47.

Keyword Difficulty is ranked on a scale of 0 to 100 with 100 representing a keyword that is very difficult to rank for.

A KD % of 47 means that the keyword is somewhat difficult to rank for but with the right SEO tactics it is possible to achieve first page rankings.

Since SEO Consultant Minneapolis is the theme of my website, I want to optimize my home page to rank for this keyword. We will dig into on-page SEO a little bit later in this post.

The next step to finding even more keywords is to head over to your competitors discovery tool to see which websites are currently ranking for that keyword.

Once you have a list of your top 5 competitors you will want to see additional keywords they are ranking for by using the Keyword Gap Tool.

The Keyword Gap Tool is going to provide you with a list of all the keywords your competitors are ranking for.

Using this list of keywords, simply research the keywords that are most relevant to landing pages on your website and start building a list of keywords you want to start ranking for.

Pro Tip:

Connect your website to Google Search Console and Google Analytics to monitor new and trending long tail keywords that Google says consumers are searching for.

How To Do On Page DIY SEO

Once you have a list of keywords, it’s time to start helping Google understand what every page on your website is about.

The key to improving your rankings on search engines is to provide a great user experience by making sure your website visitors land on the page that provides the best information based on their search query.

To do this we use meta tags, heading tags, bold text and great content on our web pages.

Meta tags include the title tag and description tag for each individual page of your website.

To make things simple, I like using the Yoast plugin for my WordPress website. The Yoast plugin allows you to insert meta tags into each page of your website and provides you with an SEO score for each page based on your keyword phrase and the on page content search engines read.

In the example below, I took the keyword SEO Consultant Minneapolis and used it as our focus keyphrase. I then wrote out the SEO title and description that describes that page.

SEO Consultant Minneapolis Meta Tags Yoast Plugin

When a search engine like Google crawls a web page, the first thing it indexes is the title of the page. Therefore, you want to make sure the keyword you want to rank for is in the title of the page.

The page description should also include the keyword you want to rank for. However, the description is more of a sales copy that you use to entice a searcher to click on your listing on the search engine results page.

The next thing you want to look at within the Yoast SEO plugin is your SEO analysis.

Minneapolis SEO Consultant SEO Analysis Yoast Plugin

The goal with the SEO analysis is to make sure the rest of your on page content is optimized to help improve your chances of ranking higher on search engines.

You should go through every single page of your website, do keyword research for each page and then use the Yoast plugin to help optimize each page of your website.

By doing this, you will help searchers find the most relevant page on your website based on the search query they type into search engines.

When a searcher finds what they are looking for, the chances of them staying on your website longer increases dramatically.

In return, Google rewards you with higher rankings because you are providing relevant information their searchers are looking for.

Start Your DIY SEO Now!

Even though the information contained within this blog post only represents a fraction of SEO, by completing these tasks you are ahead of 90% of your competition.

I also can’t stress enough that having the right SEO tools and knowing how to use them is what will set you apart from the competition.