Can You DIY Your SEO?

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How Do I Get People To My Website?

You just built your website but what do you do next? How are you going to get users to come to the website?

Sure, you could advertise using Google Ads or on social media, but once you stop advertising, the traffic stops with it. Advertising only brings people to your site as long as you advertise. If your site is not optimized for the user’s journey these users may stop and go.  Although you might be raising awareness, you may not be converting your visitors.

An alternative choice to Pay-per-click advertising ( advertisers bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market on search engines) is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Organic search is responsible for a much larger amount of website traffic. Focusing efforts on SEO will increase the number of users from this channel over time.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is the process of tailoring a website and/or content to be found for specific search terms. These search terms are often the ones used by those who are about to take action or convert.  To optimize a page for a specific search term the content on that page will need to solve the users’ search query. The better the content is at solving these search terms the higher it will rank on Google. The higher the rank, the more chance it will have of the user navigating to the site. Herein lies the magic of SEO.

Why SEO Works

How often do you use search in a day?

People conduct a number of searches throughout the day to solve everything from where to eat to what car they should purchase next. All of these search terms are the starting point to a buyer’s journey. So, if you have your website and content optimized for the correct search terms, there’s a better chance these users will come to your site. Here are some facts from Hubspot:

  • Content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising. (Content Marketing Institute, 2017) (Source)
  • Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got about 4.5 times more leads than companies that published zero to four monthly posts. (HubSpot, 2015) Source

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Is SEO Worth It?

Optimizing a website does require a significant investment early on. There are often many steps to complete in order to optimize your site. While this process does take some time it is often cost-effective in the long run.

If your website is not ranking or ranking poorly, your customers are not finding you. If you can not be found online it will be very difficult for your website to generate leads or sales. Those who do rank on the first page will capture the majority of search traffic. The higher you rank the better. Here is the click-through-rate (CTR )for the first page of Google.

 

          Rank           

CTR for Unbranded Keywords
1 28.2%
2 12.73%
3 8.56%
4 5.52%
5 3.82%
6 2.68%
7 1.96%
8 1.54%
9 1.27%
10 0.99%

Source

Can I do SEO Myself?

The process of search engine optimization requires a large amount of input. As a business owner, it probably is not practical for you to spend the time trying to DIY your website’s SEO if you could spend that time working on other aspects of your business. Choosing to do your own SEO is a significant opportunity cost. You would need to learn the various elements and do the work while not focusing on other areas of your business or leaving them to someone else.

While SEO may be only one of your marketing channels it is really a combination of different disciplines coming together. SEO strategies vary by business and industry. Each of the disciplines requires a different set of skills, from content marketing, link building, local SEO, Google Analytics, etc. Each of these have different requirements and require their own investment.

SEO Does Not Stop

Google’s Algorithm

One of the biggest challenges in SEO is the fact that it is always changing. Google is constantly changing their ranking algorithm to improve the results shown to their users. The practices used 5+ years ago to optimize content would not work today. But this is for the best. When Google makes changes people are often looking for that one ranking factor that will get their sites on to the first page. Once discovered, these ranking factors will become exploited potentially leading to sites ranking well when they are not very helpful.

Mobile-First Indexing

An example of a recent change in search is Google’s move to mobile-first indexing. Google now looks at how mobile-friendly a site is to determine it’s rank. So what does this mean? If your site has not been optimized for the mobile experience it will not rank as well as it had. This recent change has added some additional factors such as: page speed, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), question-based search queries, and local search to name a few.

Competition

One of the best ways to rank well is to find out why your competition does. If you do rank well, they are finding out why you do. If your SEO is not maintained you could potentially lose your positions to your competitors as they have an agency that is able to monitor their competitive space. While this could be done manually it would be much more cost-efficient to use a service or a tool for this. The downside of this is that these tools are costly for individuals. The benefit of using an agency is it will most likely have these tools in-house.

Technical Knowledge

Ranking factors also include a user on-site experience. If your website delivers a poor experience to your users, Google will take this into account when determining where you should rank. This creates an opportunity for your competitors to surpass you in rank.

Technical SEO requires knowledge in website design, coding, servers, etc. These factors are often some of the largest issues regarding a site’s SEO. In most cases, the solution requires the attention of someone who has knowledge in these areas. It could be an issue with your hosting or perhaps website assets impacting load speeds.

So Can You Do Your Own SEO?

The answer is, it is up to you. If you can afford to learn all the elements of SEO and invest the time required to implement all the changes on your site. You could get it all right the first time.

The alternative would be to hire a professional. Those who work with the tools, read the updates, do the keyword research, optimize websites and content every day. Let the professionals do what they do best, so you can do what you do best.

If your interested in optimizing your site contact us here and schedule a free 30-minute consultation to discuss your opportunities.

 

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