DIY SEO –– What You Can (and Can’t) Do Yourself

Search engine optimization remains a critical consideration for any business hoping to rank well online. Of course, with budgets stretched thin and more businesses than ever tightening their financial belts, chances are good that you’re wondering what aspects of SEO you can do yourself and which you should avoid doing.

DIY SEO: The Steps You Should Do

Anyone can learn some basic SEO steps. This can help you save time and money while ensuring complete control over these processes. Here are a few of the steps that you can safely consider keeping in-house:

• Keyword Research – Keywords play a pivotal role in SEO and accurate research is important. You can use platforms like Ahrefs or Google’s keyword tool (built into the Google Ads platform) to analyze and match terms to ensure that you’re mirroring search intent and surfacing the information potential customers want and need.
• Build Internal Links – Good internal linking between your website’s pages is an essential part of ranking well in Google search results. Internal links are important because they help Google’s bots discover and understand your pages.
• Create Content – Content is at the heart of many SEO efforts. We’re talking about website copy, blog posts, whitepapers, eBooks, social media posts, ad creative, and more. All content you create must be optimized with your chosen keywords and implemented when and where it makes the most sense.
• On-Page SEO – SEO is divided into two halves: on-page and off-page. On-page SEO is well within your control. You can manage it by creating accurate, optimized metal title tags and descriptions, page URLs, image file names, and image alt text.

DIY SEO: What You Should Avoid

While you can do a lot to improve SEO on your own, there are some pitfalls to avoid. These include the following:

• Creating Overarching Strategies – While creating a basic, short-term SEO strategy yourself is possible, avoid developing long-term, overarching strategies. Instead, work with a specialist who can help you anticipate shifts in SEO and digital marketing, as well as understand industry best practices.
• In-Depth Optimization – Creating keyword-rich, optimized, original content is important, but some optimization is best left to the experts. This includes local SEO, voice SEO, and off-page SEO.

Ultimately, SEO should be handled both in-house and through an expert partner. Taking a multifaceted approach ensures that you retain control over some aspects of the process while giving you access to a specialist for elements too technical or too critical for your team.