How to DIY your blog SEO on a shoestring budget |
It's not a necessity to invest in expensive advertising tools to perform SEO for your blog. And it shouldn't be expensive as well. Learn how to make it happen yourself with seven steps.
When you are getting closer to when the New Year hits its stride There's a good chance that you'll go through the budget and expenditure and trying to determine how you used the money you had last year and how you can decrease your spending this year. You've been there and it's an exhausting experience.
When you're looking for methods to reduce costs, it's not uncommon to find strategies and techniques you've tried for some time and could result in a substantial amount of money, and find ways to either eliminate them or take these tools to your personal.
For some reason, many marketers feel they need an expert in search engine optimization (SEO) professional or other tools that can help their efforts in that area is an absolute must. This is why I'm here to let you know that you are able to do your own SEO without spending any money at all.
Have you been blown off by the power of your imagination?
SEO can be an essential component of a comprehensive marketing plan.
In reality, 61% of marketers' primary focus inbound marketing is enhancing their SEO, as well as increasing their organic presence. With the growth of voice searches and its popularity that this percentage will only increase year-over-year.
Ensuring your SEO is up to date and boosting your organic site traffic can put you ahead of the competitors in your industry and increase the accessibility of users online who conduct internet searches.
How can you make your own SEO strategy?
1. Create a keyword list
The first step to implement your SEO approach on your own is determining your primary keywords by doing search engine research . These can be either long- or short-tail however, the essence is that they must include terms you wish your website to rank well as as terms that your target customers are searching for in relation related to your specialization on the internet.
For example, if you're an agency that is specialized in marketing and design, you'll want start by creating a checklist that reads as follows:
Marketing Agency
Design agency
Design and Marketing company
Quality design
Marketing strategy
Long-term keyword phrases could appear like these:
What's the most effective way to create a winning marketing strategy?
Best design techniques for email marketing
Marketing goals: How do you identify them?
Different marketing strategies to implement
These are only an example. You'll need to identify what are your areas of knowledge and develop from there.
It is also a good idea to talk with your sales team to see what questions prospects might be seeking out and also what they're asking for assistance with. This can inform your keyword list as well.
Check your current rankings so you know which keywords to focus on as well as examine your competitor's rankings and. That will give you the idea of keywords that are ignored, which will help you focus on them. You will also gain advantages.
2. Establish or create pillar pages
Pillar webpages are designed to serve as a complete solution to an area of interest, which is also linked to one of your key phrases. They are usually longer, because they don't leave a one unfinished and cover a wide range of ground as they can.
You have pages on your website that need to be updated, or you'll need to create your pages. In designing or updating the pages, ensure that you go into various aspects of the theme.
For instance, suppose you're developing a website with the words "marketing strategies".
It's important to think about what you need to create to bring your strategy into place, the objectives that the strategy can assist you to attain, various methods and methods which a strategy is composed of as well as how to determine the success of your plan and what you need to do to implement your strategy.
If you have a specific keyword or phrase you'd like to rank for it is best to have a the pillar page. So, if you make reference to that phrase in the text, you'll have the ability to create a hyperlink to this particular page on the pillar, which will increase the website's potential to rank in search results related to the term.
3. Note duplicate content as well as broken links
If you've been writing blog posts at will there's a good chance you've accumulated a large amount of obsolete or duplicate articles and maybe even some incomplete pages. You must fix those problems in order for your website to be ranked well. These issues will work against your website.
Make a spreadsheet listing each blog post and keyword related to the keywords in some way. If you have a lot of blog posts you might have to create subgroups for each search term. Check out the picture below to get an idea of the idea.
This can help you manage your efforts so you can more easily identify blog posts which are the most similar to other posts.
Also, make sure to create an an extra spreadsheet which houses any broken links you discover during your research. This will allow you to easily pull the links and redirect them.
4. Redirect and update your site
When you've finished the spreadsheet, go through the related blog posts carefully. If you find any that appear to be repeated or reiterating similar concepts, it's best to move the less-skilled or dated blog articles to updated, better-quality pages.
This can reduce the self-competing of your content (yes it's possible to rival yourself on the search results) Also, it will make sure that your pages are ranked for the correct search terms.
Also, this is a good occasion to change any blog content that doesn't have to be changed, however may benefit from more details or a fresh look.
Accordingly, since you're going to maintain these pages, you'll want to make certain that the pages contain appropriate keywords in the text, and also offer the most current information that is available.
5. Include links to the pillar pages in the text
When your blog is free of duplicate content, and all debris has been removed, as well as damaged links you need to look through your blog's pages and ensure that they're linking directly to the pillar pages .
Start by reviewing the subgroupings you have selected as well as the hyperlinks under them.
Let's say there are three blogs that correlate to marketing strategy as well as email marketing . Go through each post and then add links to your page on pillars for marketing strategy with "marketing strategies" as the anchor text.
6. Design a link plan that is able to move further
It's crucial to be sure that you adhere to the same method for all subsequent blog posts that you create. It's been a long efforts to enhance your existing material, but one of the things that can cause harm to that content is if do not adhere to the guidelines.
There's no doubt that I've written about spreadsheets many times however spreadsheets are a great tool in this manner. They can help you accomplish each step, and that includes this one. It is advised to record the key words along with, in the column below, the post that is given to them.
It's also a good idea to include a range of anchor words or words with long tails that can be employed for every single one.
In describing which article is linked to what keyword(s) It will be possible to keep new team members in the same place as well as provide a simple guide to check against when you're editing or reviewing any blog posts you'll write later on.
It is also helpful to make sure you be sure to keep SEO at the forefront of your thoughts as you write the web content.
7. Be sure to keep track of your results
Review how your strategy is doing each quarter or every month. It is important to know whether your website is starting to gain more prominence in search results or if it's getting stuck in the same pattern and help you identify any problems.
There are no-cost software tools like Moz and you could do a Google search with your keywords from time until the date to determine how often your posts are popping on the internet.
If you're looking for a way to monitor the data and do not need to spend money on SEO tools like Moz Then I've one final word to share with you. This is something we've talked about a lot this morning and that's spreadsheets.
SEO does not have to be expensive. an enormous amount of cash
A solid SEO strategy is crucial if you want to be easy to find online by your customers. Hiring an external SEO specialist can be expensive however it's not necessary.
If you decide to move SEO work within your company and following the steps mentioned in the previous paragraphs, you'll be able to get your blog up and running to ensure that the top blog content begins to appear on search engines, and will continue to rise in the years that pass.
To review the basics, the procedures are as follows:
Make a list of key words
Create pillar pages in the case that you already have an existing popular website you utilize, changing your existing content to be Pillar pages
Scoping out duplicate content
Updates to outdated, stale content, and establishing redirects for content that's competing with itself
Seeding links to the cluster's content on the pillar pages of your site.
Implementing a link strategy
Also you should be keeping the watchful eye on your results.
Easy-peasy.
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