You’ve therefore determined that your firm needs to work with an SEO agency to assist you prepare your website for search engines. You’re left with only one difficult decision to make right now: how do I choose the best SEO company? If you don’t have a solid grasp of search engine optimization, the process of screening experienced SEO businesses may be challenging.

It has happened innumerable times. A business is in need of SEO services and begins screening digital marketing providers for assistance, but it is unsure of where to begin. With this article, we hope to provide business owners with a resource that will enable them to recognize lies and scams.

Your website might be one of the first resources users see when they conduct a web search with the assistance of an SEO expert or agency. But before paying someone else to assist in facilitating better web results, you might want to deploy a few do-it-yourself strategies to increase your SEO.

Before engaging an SEO company, small business owners should attempt these DIY SEO tips:

1. Start with Personas

Understanding the profile of your target customer and what drives them begins to increase traffic to your website. Why? Because websites are ultimately created for people rather than machines. So investigate their problems, learn why they purchase, and develop a customer profile. This will assist you in coordinating your website strategy and SEO efforts for maximum online visibility.

Start by learning more about your target market before developing a customer persona. Obtain as much information as you can about them, including their age, gender, salary, and industry of employment. To understand people better and what motivates them, also take into account their interests and pastimes. Look at the content categories that appeal to 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, analyze it to uncover patterns in customer behavior that will help you create a detailed persona of your ideal buyer.

2. Plan Your Keyword Research

Make careful to plan out your keyword strategy before you upload a ton of content and copy to your website. Keywords are the words or phrases that members of your target audience use in search engines like Google and Bing to find goods and services or to try to solve an issue. inquiry engines, like Google, will deliver the most accurate results from websites, blogs, and photographs by matching up the most relevant information to the user’s inquiry.

You can use a variety of tools, including Wordstream, Ubersuggest, and Google’s Keyword Planner, to gain insightful information about the keywords you should concentrate on. Use these keywords throughout your content in an organic way so that they blend naturally with the rest of the text instead of sticking out like a sore thumb. And speaking of natural keywords, don’t forget to use relevant long-tail keywords in your content to attract more specific audiences.

3. 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. SpyFu is a simple cost effective tool to gain better insights into your competitors’ paid and organic search initiatives. 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.

Analyze the backlinks of your competitors to see which ones are driving their rankings. Generate a list of their domains and take note of any recurring patterns. This will give you insights into how they’ve been able to build links and where you should target for your own link building efforts.

Read Also: How do You Market Local SEO?

Keep track of what content performs well for your competitors, and use this as a benchmark for creating content of your own. Also, take note of their social media engagement metrics to get an idea of what works best on each platform. If you can work out which websites link to your competitors’ content, you have the opportunity to win those links too.

4. 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 optimization 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 optimization 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.

5. 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. So if you want to add content from another site, a simple best practice is to link to it and reference the original source or utilize 301 redirects from any duplicate pages to the original pages.

Make sure that any content you create for your website is unique and fresh. That way, search engines will recognize 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.