DIY SEO for small businesses

DIY SEO for small businesses or getting better rankings for your content and getting ahead of your competitors.

There was a time some years ago when all you had to do for do-it-yourself seo was to bung your posts or pages full of your keywords.

Then all small business owners had to do was sit back and watch any rubbish would rise up to the first page of Google’s rankings.

For better of for worse these days are long gone.

Nowadays Google has sophisticated algorithms.

These try to sort out which is the best and most relevant content relating to a user’s search term.

Your rankings don’t depend completely on this as Google also gives weight to the authority of your website.

So seo for a small business has become more difficult.

But at the end of the day content is king.

You’ll often hear the expression “give Google what it wants” and then your content will rank well.

That’s all good and well but first you have to figure out what Google wants.

You might be surprised to know that Google is happy to tell you what it wants.

The problem is understanding and implementing it.

First you have to read pages and pages and pages of complex stuff and then figure out how that applies to your particular situation.

After that you have to implement it on your site.

I do admire those who have the time and intellectual rigour to do this.

Me, I don’t have the time or the knowledge and neither do most us wanting to do DIY SEO for small businesses.

However you can identify the main areas where you can make your page more “Google friendly”.

Doing SEO for small business breaks down into two main components:

Search Engine Optimization*
Content

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is about giving the right technical signals.

These include

Having the your keywords in crucial places, e.g. in your post title and having right “keyword density”. That is the number of times you use your keyword relative to the length of the post.
Use of italics
Use of bold
Use of tags (H1 – H6) in your post. These tell Google the importance of various terms to the understanding of your content.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). When Google stopped people ranking content by keyword stuffing, LSI rating was introduced.
This was to check that the content was related to the keywords.
So if you article was about “cold brew coffee” Google would search your post for other terms normally found in articles related to this keyword, such as grind, temperature, filter, ice, cold water and so on.
Images present in your post
Inserting your keyword in to the ALT description of your images(s)
Internal Links – linking to pages in your site
External Links – linking to pages outside of your site

Content

Content is where Google rates your writing.
As a rule the easier your content is to read the higher Goole will rank it.
“Easy to read” covers a lot of ground.
Essentially it’s a combination of the words and the layout.
Write your piece in terms people can easily understand and laid out in a form that is easy on the eye. Google will take notice of this while making ranking decisions.
It takes into consideration concerns such as:
Sentence length. Sentences that are too long are considered difficult to read
Difficult words. Google prefers simple words where they will do.
Passive or Active Voice
Whether your text contains formal/old fashioned words
Sufficient use of adjectives
Layout

That’s the first step dealt with.

You’ve carried out your diy search engine optimization and your post is now effectively optimized for Google against your keywords.

But then, that’s only half the battle.

Yes, it’s going to push your post up the rankings.

But what you really want is to be above your competitors.

They may have done a better job of search engine optimization on their post for the chosen keywords.

You can compare your sites with the top sites but, boy, is it a long process.

How do you do this?

First, open up the top post for your keywords

Second, install Chrome App SEO Meta In One Click. Click the app when you have the post open and it will give you some of the SEO information.

Third, open the view page source for the post and find the number of times the keywords are used and so on.

Repeat this exercise for the top 10 sites for your keyword.

Believe me, you have better things to do with your time than this.

So, here you are, a small business owner facing DIY SEO for small businesses.

How in goodness name do you

Understand all the above factors?

Implement them into your post?

Personally, I gave up trying to do this on my own some time ago.

As I see it, you have two options to simplify your diy search engine optimization.

Get someone else to do it for you. I have done this in the past. The results can be variable and there’s little recourse if it doesn’t work. Added to that, every time your post slipped down the rankings you had to pay again to push it back up.
Use the software that the “paid consultants” use. There is a wide choice of programs but the two that I have found most effective are:

TextMetrics –

This is ideal for first pass on SEO and for your content layout and readability.

To start write your draft post and then put it into the Textmetrics system.

You will then be shown a list of SEO and Content improvements you can make.

Each improvement is recorded and your score is shown as you head towards 100%.

Find out more about Textmetrics https://www.textmetrics.com/ and sign up for a Free Textmetrics account https://app.textmetrics.com/#/register-free

Page Optimiser Pro (POP)

While Textmetrics does the initial donkey work, POP is the surgeon’s scalpel that allows you to compare your post with your direct competitors and optimize your post to work to the top of the Google rankings.

There’s a free 7 day trial which gives 5 free reports.

You can sign up for a starter account for $10 per month which currently gives 5 reports per month (a report is a comparison between your post and others you select.

Each time you do some work and ask for a new score, this counts as another report).

As with all SEO on existing posts/pages, only make limited changes at one time.

Too many changes at once alerts Google and it automatically assumes you’re up to no good with the consequent results!!

To find out more about Page Optimzer Pro go to https://pageoptimizer.pro/

To summarise, when your doing DIY SEO for small businesses, learn how to use a couple of decent tools and use them wisely. Beware non-subscription tools. These usually work (not always at all) at best for a short while.

SEO is an ongoing process which requires continual investment by the software providers to stay up to date.

DIY SEO for small businesses is possible for the relatively unskilled and with a bit of practice can be executed quite quickly.
While advertising and social media also have a pert to play in building your business, good SEO is great value for money and once done properly needs only slight maintenance.

Look at some of the top posts and see whne they were published.

Many have been there for some time.

With a little effort yours could as well!