How to DIY your blog SEO with a budget of just $0 |
It doesn't require expensive advertising tools to perform SEO for your blog and it doesn't have to be expensive, too. Here's how to do it yourself in 7 simple steps.
In the moment that the New Year hits its stride, you're most likely going over budgets and expenses in the process of figuring out how you spent so much dollars last year, and then how you'll cut back on spending this year. We've all been there and it's not a pleasant experience.
In the search for ways to save money, it's not uncommon to find strategies and equipment you've been using that will cost you a lot of money and find ways to either eliminate them or take these tools into your own.
But for some reason, many marketers believe that having a search engine optimization (SEO) professional or tools that can help facilitate their work in this area is essential. Well, I'm here to tell you that you can effectively DIY your blog's SEO without spending any amount of money.
Is your mind blown?
SEO plays an important element of your overall marketing plan.
Actually, 61% of marketers' top goal for marketing inbound is enhancing the SEO of their websites and increasing their presence on the internet. And I'll bet that with voice search continuing to rise in importance, this number will only grow over time.
Making sure your SEO is on the same page and increasing your website's organic traffic could put you ahead of the competition in your field and also make you more accessible to users who are conducting online searches.
How to DIY your SEO strategy
1. Create a keyword list
The first step to implement your SEO plan yourself is to identify the keywords you want to rank for via search engine research . These could be longer or shorter tails and, more importantly these should be the terms you would like your content to rank for and phrases your audience uses to search for items related to your field online.
In the case of an agency that is specialized in marketing and design, you'll want to start with a plan that appears as follows:
Agency for marketing
Design agency
Design and marketing company
High-quality design
Marketing strategy
Your long-term key words could appear similar to:
What are the steps to implement a market strategy
Best design techniques to use for marketing via email
How to identify marketing goals
Marketing strategies of various kinds to utilize
These are only examples. The first thing you need to do is identify your particular areas of expertise, and then build on that.
It is also a good idea to talk with the sales department to find out the questions your potential customers are looking for and the issues they're asking for assistance on, since that will inform your list of keywords as well.
Make sure to check your current rankings so you can determine which key words to concentrate on, and it doesn't hurt to look at your competitors' ranking, too. That will give you the idea of keyword that is not being used, to help you focus on them to gain an advantage.
2. Establish or create pillar pages
Pillar pages are intended to be the one-stop shop for information on a certain area, that will also tie into one of the keywords you have chosen to use. They are usually longer as they don't leave any stone unturned and cover as wide a range of ground as they can.
These pages are either already in existence that need to be updated, or you need to create the pages. When designing or updating these pages, be sure to look into different aspects of the theme.
As an example let's say you're creating an web page that contains the words "marketing strategies".
It is important to talk about the best way to put a plan to achieve the objectives strategies can assist you to reach, different mediums and methods that a strategy consists of and how you can measure your strategy's success, and how to use your strategy.
For every keyword or words you'd like to rank for You'll need a pillar page. That way, whenever you make use of that term within your text you'll be able to hyperlink back to that particular page. This will increase the content's ability to rank for that word.
3. Identify duplicate content and broken hyperlinks
If you've been writing blog posts at will, chances are you have a lot of dated and duplicate content out there and maybe even damaged pages. You must rectify those issues if you want your site to be ranked well. they'll end up working against your site.
Make a spreadsheet listing each keyword, along with blog posts that are tied to that keyword in some way. If you've got a number of blog entries You may need create subgroups of each search term. See the image below to understand what I mean.
It will also help you plan your efforts so you can quickly determine the blog posts that are most like others.
Also, make sure to create an additional spreadsheet to store any broken links you encounter when doing this research in order to easily remove them and redirect them.
4. Update and redirect your website
After you've completed your spreadsheet, review the related blog posts attentively. If they're repetitive or reiterating the same ideas, redirect those less well-thought out or outdated blog posts to the more modern, more high-quality sites.
This will reduce any self-competing content (yes you can compete with itself in the search results), and ensure the right pages rank for the right keywords.
This is also a good opportunity to update any blog content that doesn't need to be redirected but could use more content or even a refreshing.
Since you'll be keeping these pages, you'll want to ensure they've got the right keywords used in the content, as well as provide the most up-to most current data available.
5. Include links to pages of pillars in content
Once your blog is cleared of duplicate content and the clutter is eliminated along with any broken links, it's the time to look through your blog's pages and verify that the appropriate pages are linked back to your the pillar pages .
Begin by looking over your subgroupings, as well as the hyperlinks that are listed beneath them.
Let's suppose you have three blog posts which are related to your marketing strategy as well as email marketing . Read each blog post, and include a link on the pillar of your marketing strategy page by using "marketing strategies" as anchor text.
6. Make a linking plan moving ahead
You'll want to make sure you've adhered to this plan to all new blog posts you're writing. You've already gone through the process to improve your old content and one thing that can harm that effort is if you don't continue.
I'm sure I've talked about spreadsheets many times, but they are your friend for this method. They can help to complete each process, and this is one. I suggest listing every keyword as well as in the following column, the pillar post that they are assigned.
It doesn't hurt to also offer a variety of anchor text or long-tail keywords that could be used for each equally.
By outlining which pillar article is associated with which keyword(s) by defining which pillar post belongs to which keyword(s), you'll ensure that you all new team members in the same place and give them a quick reference to refer to when you're reviewing and editing the content for your blog in the future.
It also ensures you continue to keep SEO top of mind as you develop your content.
7. Continue to track your results
Make sure you check in on how your strategy is doing every month or quarter. It is important to know whether your website has begun to get higher rankings in search results, or if your content is in a rut, and assist you in finding any potential issues.
You can use free tools like Moz and you could also do a Google search based on the keywords you choose from time to time to see whether your website is showing into the search results.
Of course, if you're struggling to find a way to track this and you don't want go in on an SEO suite like Moz Then I've one closing word for you, and it's one we've said a lot this morning and that is spreadsheets.
SEO doesn't have to be expensive
Having an SEO strategy is vital if you want to be easy to find online by your customers. Hiring an outsourced SEO expert could be expensive however it's not necessary.
If you move your SEO work in-house and following the steps above, you can get your blog up and running in order that the best blog posts start to get ranked, and continues to rank over time.
The basic steps are:
In assembling a keyword list
Creating pillar pages, or, if you have a high-traffic page to make use of, transforming existing posts to become pillar pages
Scoping out duplicate content
Updating stale, out-dated content and granting redirects to content that's competing with itself
Seeding the links to your cluster's content using the pillar pages
Establishing a linking strategy
Also you should be keeping a close eye on your results.
Easy-peasy.