Figuring out the ins and outs of SEO is no easy feat. Even if you’ve got your SEO strategy all figured out, new innovations on proper SEO practices are being released as fast as you can say “keyword optimization”. This is why hiring a quality SEO firm is never a bad idea.
If you’re still insistent on doing it all on your own for your big or small business, this is possible but just keep in mind that it is time consuming and requires a lot of work. For developing an SEO that will show the results you’re hoping for, follow these simple steps.
Step 1: Take an Unobjective Look at Your Website
First thing’s first, you need to observe your website as a third-party viewer. This can be done simply by setting your browser to incognito mode and searching for your site on Google. By doing this, you’ll be able to develop an honest, unbiased opinion on the overall user experience of your site. What’s even better than doing this yourself is asking a few internet users to do it for you.
Gather a team of unbiased internet browsers, have them play around with your site and visit all of the pages it contains. Then ask them about their overall experience in terms of looks, functionality, and value of the content. It’s best to do this by having them fill out a form with the relevant questions and make it completely anonymous. This way, they won’t be afraid to give their true opinions.
Step 2: Identify Specific Goals for Optimization
The first step allows you to determine what needs improvement on the site, so the next step is obviously to improve those things. By acting on the feedback that was providing, your well on your way to higher search engine rankings. Next, you must identify the specific goals you have in mind for SEO.
The general goal is clearly to rank as high as possible, but specifically what is needed to be done to accomplish that? This can be more clearly determined through data analytics procedures – a professional SEO agency might often calls this phase an SEO audit. An audit tells you about the overall web traffic to the site as well as how long internet users are actually staying on the site. It gives insight into things like click-through-rates, bounce rates, and conversions.
Step 3: Research Your Keywords
There are plenty of resources out there that will generate a list of keywords relating to your site. Check out tools like SEMRush, KWFinder, or Ahrefs – you will have to pay for these, but it is entirely worth it. These sites will not only give you a thorough list of keywords, but also tell you how often they’re searched for each month, as well as the difficulty level involved in ranking for them.
Step 4: Content Creation
Every website is made up of one thing: content. Not all content is created equal, especially in the eyes of Google. Google will rank your site based on many things, and one of these things is the value, readability, and overall quality of the content you provide. If you’re not a great writer yourself, hire a freelance writer to develop some high-quality, interesting content containing your keywords.
