How to do your own SEO – A complete guide

This is a simple yet powerful guide on how to do your own SEO for your website.

In this post, I’ll go over the following:

• What is search engine optimization 
• Importance of SEO for your coaching website
• How to do your own SEO
• Best SEO tools
• SEO audit for your website

If you’re tired of relying on others for your SEO and getting no results and want to learn the basics, then you’ll love this post. 

Let’s get started

What is SEO? 

Search engine optimization is optimizing your website and content to achieve better visibility in search engines.

There are three main parts of SEO: 

• On-page SEO 
• Off-page SEO
• Technical SEO 

Your website does not grow only by launching it. You need to optimize it regularly to achieve the results you want. For that, you need to have a basic understanding and a strategy. 

I’ll go over the essentials of SEO which will help you identify your needs and create an SEO strategy that works for your website. 

Benefits of SEO

SEO has many benefits that we’re all aware of, like organic traffic, more leads, better conversion, brand awareness and credibility, and it’s a long-term marketing strategy. 

But let’s go over a bunch of related benefits.

• Better cost management
  SEO leads to an inbound marketing strategy that can help you optimize cost management and save resources. You won’t need to spend a hefty amount on Ads once SEO starts to work. 

• Takes you ahead of the competition
  SEO can help you beat your competition. When you rank better than your competitors, your chances of acquiring more market share are higher. People prefer organically ranking sites over Ads.
  
• Local SEO
  Local SEO is one of the most important benefits of SEO. This means targeting a smaller audience within the locality of the business. It can help small businesses from getting lost in the cut-throat competition on search engines.
  
• Quantifiable results
  SEO helps you understand your audience and their behaviour to optimize it accordingly. You can trace various aspects of your audience by using analytical software like what keywords you rank for, demographics, user behaviour, bounce rate, click-through rate and so on.
  
• 24/7 promotion
  Unlike Ads or other sources of marketing, SEO is not time reliant. It works 24/7, and once you start ranking well, your business is being promoted even when you are asleep without having to spend anything.

These are just a few lesser-known benefits. There are countless benefits of SEO for your website in general.

How to do your own SEO

Here’s a detailed guide on how to do SEO for your own website.

Research

Research should be the first step of your SEO process. You should begin by studying and researching your business, website, competitors, industry, and niche.

Last but also most importantly, move on to the keyword research that can be done using various tools to target the right audience and get the best results.

The following should be included in your keyword research:

• What are your main keywords
• What are the relevant keywords 
• Keyword difficulty level (Should be low)
• Keyword search volume (Higher the better)
• CPC (higher the better)
• Clicks on the keywords (higher the better)
• Traffic potential (higher the better)
• Country-based search volume
• Global volume (higher the better)
• Top-ranking pages for that keyword

With the right keywords targeting the right audience, your business will be headed towards new leads and sales rapidly. 

Once you have done the above, use these keywords to create a page that is 10 times better than the top-ranking pages for that keyword.

Content

Website Content is one of the best ways of SEO in almost any industry. Creating useful and quality content will help with SEO and establish authority and credibility in the industry.

Content can be created using the above keyword research. There are various types of content that you can create once you are clear on the idea: 

• Long-form content 
• Guides
• Blog posts
• Informative articles
• List posts 
• Lead generators

Optimization

Website Optimization is the most compelling part of SEO. It is important to ensure that search engines understand your business to rank you better. 

The following points should be considered when you’re doing website optimization:

• Improving titles and meta description
• Making changes to site structure where needed
• Updating existing content 
• Improving readability
• Speed optimization
• Proofreading 
• Broken link checking and correction
• Image optimization
• Remove inactive plugins and extra themes
• Regularly update the existing plugins and themes
• Detect 404 errors
• Checking and incorporating keywords where and when necessary 

Google considers speed one of the most important factors before ranking a site. Make sure the speed of your site is up to the mark. 

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the most important. You can install Yoast to help you with this. Make sure to go over the following while doing on-page SEO.

• Focus keyword 
• SEO title 
• Slug/URL 
• Meta description
• Meta tags
• Keyphrase in SEO title 
• Checking for inbound/outbound links 
• Even the distribution of focus keyphrase 
• Keyphrase in subheading 
• Text length 
• Image keyphrase

Off-page and technical SEO

Off-page and technical SEO requires knowledge, skill, and time. However, the following should be kept in mind while doing off-page and technical SEO

• Creation and registration of sitemap.xml
• Schema markup optimization
• Web 2.0 submissions
• Google NLP optimization
• Gmb listing
• Mobile responsive check
• Speed optimization

Link building

Link building is the backbone of SEO; the better links you have, the greater the chances of your website’s rankings. Backlinks are one of the most important factors considered by Google. 

You can up your link-building game by doing the following:

• Internal linking 
• Broken link checking 
• Building relevant links from high-quality pages
• Link building through link exchange 
• Getting relevant mentions from other blogs/sites
• Regular backlink analysis 
• Publishing on other sites for high-quality links

Best SEO tools

There are numerous tools available online, both paid and free. However, we have only shortlisted the ones we use and recommend. 

1. Ahrefs 

Ahrefs is one of the most popular and powerful tools used and recommended by many SEO experts. It has crawled the second most number of websites, only next to Google. 

This is a complete SEO tool, from keyword research to backlink checker. You can take care of all your SEO needs through Ahrefs.

Key features of Ahrefs: 

• Site audit 
• Keyword research
• DR and UR ranking 
• Backlink profile
• Organic traffic and traffic value 
• Competitors analysis

Price Range: You can sign up for Ahrefs to get free limited access to site explorer and site audit. However, for complete access, there are various packages starting from $99/month.

2. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is an SEO tool developed by Neil Patel. It is also one of the favourite tools used by experts. It is an excellent tool for keyword research and site audit.

Key features of Ubersuggest: 

• Domain overview 
• Rank tracking
• Site audit
• Keyword research
• Competitor analysis
• Backlink checker
• SEO issues and solutions 
• Traffic overview 
• Organic keywords and monthly traffic 
• Top pages for traffic 

Price Range: You can audit up to 3 sites daily with limited information access in the free version. However, there are multiple premium packages available starting from $12/month. 

3. Yoast SEO

The above two tools will take care of all of your Off-page SEO needs. However, Yoast is an all-in-one plugin for on-page SEO. 

It shows ways to master on-page SEO by providing step-by-step instructions, details, and guides.

Key features of Yoast :

• Focus keyword
• Title 
• Slug
• Meta description
• Keyword distribution 
• Inbound/outbound links 
• Images and images keyphrase 
• Keyphrase length/density
• Alt tags
• Readability 
• Schema 
• Social share preview

Pricing: A free version is available that covers a handful of features. However, the premium version is available at $99/per year. 

How to make the best use of metrics for SEO

Metrics tell you important information about your website performance, traffic and how users engage with your website. 

You can use this information to optimize your strategy and do more of what is working. There are various tools out there that can give you this information, but we recommend using the following: 

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console 

Even the tools like Ahrefs and Ubbersuggest can help with this. Here’s how you can make the best use of these metrics. 

Search engine ranking: 

Search engine rankings show a detailed overview of various keywords and search terms generating organic traffic to your website. This is helpful because you can optimize your content by adding or removing keywords accordingly. Also, it gives you ideas for more content. 

Bounce rate:

Bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave your website immediately after clicking on it. This number is important because although you are getting the traffic, it’s not working for you. You should figure out the issue with your content and improve it. 

Traffic source: 

The traffic source shows which channel works the most for you; it could be organic traffic or social media. Either way, this will help you understand your audience better, and you can spend more time on that respective channel. 

Sessions by country: 

This shows the percentage of traffic you are getting the traffic from. It helps understand whether or not your desired audience is being targeted or not. 

Page visits: 

Page visits provide you with a list of your top-ranking pages. You can further optimize your content on these pages to generate more traffic from them. 

Sessions by device:

This shows where your users view your content, whether desktop, mobile, or tablet. This piece of information is important because if most of your visitors are viewing it from mobile devices, then you need to make sure that your website is optimized for smaller screens. 

These are a few important metrics that you need to review regularly, along with traffic growth. 

Website SEO Audit

You can request a free SEO audit to get a detailed report on the following and actionable steps you can implement yourself to get your campaign up and running. 

• Your website’s quality and speed
• Website’s analytics
• Domain authority and importance
• Your backlink profile 
• Current organic traffic 
• Your website’s traffic value 
• Organic keywords your site is ranking for
• And much more 

Conclusion

There are many ways to market your website, including paid ads and social media, and they’re just as important. But most of these have a short life span. Once you stop paying for the ads, you stop getting traffic. 

SEO is a long-term marketing strategy where you can organically rank on search engines and get relevant traffic to your website. 

I hope this guide has helped you understand the SEO basics and devise a strategy for your business. 

Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions. Or leave a quick comment below.