How do you DIY your blog? SEO with a budget of just $0 |
You don't need fancy marketing tools to do SEO for your blog, and it shouldn't need to be costly too. Here's how to do it yourself in 7 easy steps.
When the New Year hits its stride You're likely to go over budgets and costs and trying to determine what you did with your cash last year, and what you'll cut back on spending this year. We've all been there, and it's not a pleasant experience.
When looking for ways to cut corners there's a tendency to identify strategies and methods you've been using that can cost a significant amount of money, and find ways to either remove them, or bring them in-house.
For some reason, the majority of marketers think that having a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist or tools to help enable their work in this area is an absolute must. But, let me let you know that you can effectively DIY your blog's SEO without spending any money at all.
Are you blown away by the thought of it?
SEO can be an vital component of the overall strategy of marketing.
In fact, 61% of marketers' most important priorities in their marketing through the internet is improving the SEO of their websites and increasing their organic presence. With increasing voice search in popularity, the percent will continue to grow year over year.
Ensuring your SEO is on the same page and increasing your natural site's traffic may put you ahead of the competition in your field and also increase the accessibility of your audiences conducting those web-based searches.
How do you DIY your SEO strategy
1. Put together your keyword list
The first step to implement the SEO plan for yourself is to find your keywords by conducting the research of keywords . They could be longer or shorter tails and, more importantly these should be the terms you would like your content to be ranked for, as well as phrases people use to search for items related to the field you work in on the internet.
If, for instance, you're an agency that specializes in marketing and design You'll need to begin with a list that looks as follows:
Agency for marketing
Design agency
Design and Marketing company
High-quality design
Marketing strategy
Your long-term keywords may look similar to this:
What are the steps to implement a market strategy
The most effective design strategies to use for marketing via email
What are the marketing objectives you want to achieve?
Different types of marketing strategies that you can employ
These are just an example. What you'll need to determine is your particular areas of expertise, and build from there.
I'd also consult with your sales team to see what questions prospects might be seeking out and what concerns they're expressing they need assistance with. This will inform your list of keywords as well.
Be sure to look at your current rankings so you know which key words to concentrate on, and don't forget to examine your competition's rankings, as well. This will provide you with the idea of keywords that are neglected and you can then 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 topic, which should also be linked to one of your keywords. The pages tend to be larger, since they do not leave a one unfinished and cover as much ground as they can.
There are pages on your site which require updating, or you need to create them. If you are designing or updating these pages, make sure you look into different aspects of the theme.
For instance suppose you're creating a website pillar for keywords like "marketing strategy".
It is important to talk about the best way to put a plan to achieve the objectives that a strategy will help you reach, different mediums and methods that a strategy consists of as well as how to gauge the success of your strategy and the best way to implement your plan.
In the case of every word or keyword you'd like to rank for it is best to have a site that is a pillar. This way, when you use that word within your text it will be possible to link back to that particular page on the pillar, which can contribute to increasing that content's ability to rank with that particular word.
3. Find duplicate content, broken links
If you've been writing blog content at random it is likely that you've lots of outdated and duplicate content, perhaps even some unfinished pages. It is imperative to fix those problems to ensure that your blog is able to be ranked well. they could work against you.
Create a spreadsheet that lists every keyword and blog posts that tie into that keyword in some way. In the event that you've got lot of blog content, you may have create subgroups of every key word. Check out the picture below to get an idea of what I mean.
It will also help you plan your activities so that you can more easily break down the blog posts that are most like others.
Be sure to also make a separate spreadsheet that houses all broken links you find when doing this research to make it easy to pull them and redirect.
4. Make updates and redirects
When you're finished creating your spreadsheet, review the similar blog content carefully. If any are extremely repetitive or reiterating the same ideas, redirect the less strategic or dated blog entries to updated, higher-quality pages.
This will reduce any self-competing content (yes you can rival itself on the search results), and ensure your pages are ranked with the appropriate keywords.
It's also an excellent chance to make changes to any blog content that doesn't have to be changed but could use more content or refresh.
In the event that you'll keep your pages on the internet, you'll need to ensure that they contain the right keywords used in the content, as well as contain the most up to current information that is available.
5. Add links to pillar pages in the text
Once your blog is clean and all duplicate content is removed, along with broken links, it's time to look through your blog's pages and make sure the right ones are linking back to your pillar pages .
Begin by looking over your subgroupings, as well as the hyperlinks listed underneath them.
Now, suppose that there are three blog sites that correlate to marketing strategy as well as marketing via email . Read each blog post, and then add a hyperlink to the pillar of your marketing strategy page with "marketing strategy" as your anchor the text.
6. Make a linking plan moving ahead
You'll want to make sure you're adhering to this method in all future blog posts that you create. After all, you went through the hassle to improve your old content and the only way to ruin that is if you aren't consistent.
I'm sure I've talked about spreadsheets many times and yet they're the best option in this strategy. They are able to assist in every stage, not just this. It is recommended to list each key word on the list, then in the subsequent column, the post assigned to them.
It's not a bad idea to provide various anchor texts or long-tail keywords which could be employed for each one also.
In describing which 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 on the same page and give them a quick checklist to reference as you review and edit any blog posts you'll be writing in the future.
Also, it helps to keep SEO at the forefront of your mind when you write your material.
7. Follow up on the results
Make sure you check in on how your strategy is doing every period of time, or every quarter. You'll want to indicate whether your website is starting to rank higher in search results, or if it's staying in a rut, and help you locate any problems.
You can use free tools like Moz and you could also conduct a search using your keywords from time to the time to check the frequency with which your posts are popping on the internet.
Of course, if you're wondering where to track it and don't want to go in on an SEO suite such as Moz and Google, I've got one final word to share with you. It's one that we've spoken about a number of times today in the past: spreadsheets.
SEO does not have to cost a lot of money
The need to have an SEO plan is essential in order to get found easily online by your clients. The hiring of an outside SEO expert can be costly yet it's not required.
Moving your SEO effort within your company and following the steps previously mentioned, you can put your blog up and running so that your most valuable blog posts start to get ranked, and continues to rank as time passes.
To review, the basic procedures are as follows:
In assembling a keyword list
creating pillar pages or if you already possess a popular page you use, revamping existing posts into Pillar pages
Scoping out duplicate content
Updating stale, out-dated content and assigning redirects for content that is competing with it
The links for your cluster's content using the pillar pages
Establishing a linking strategy
Of course keep an check on the results.
Easy-peasy.