You’ve decided to take a “do it yourself” SEO approach.
Whether you’re on a tight budget or want to build in-house expertise, succeeding with DIY SEO takes careful planning and prioritization.
At Human, we’ve built an SEO team with a proven track record of generating organic traffic and authority for clients.
To help you see results with organic SEO, we’ve compiled a step-by-step DIY SEO guide, including the software, team and strategic steps you need to create and execute a results-driven strategy.
Earning organic authority, rankings and traffic requires the right mix of technical, analytical and creative skills.
When taking on SEO in-house, you’ll need these roles in your corner:
Some of these roles may overlap on your team, but it’s important to have the right skills to carry out your strategy before diving in.
With SEO software, you can research keywords opportunities, track your own SEO stats, compare performance to competitors and so much more.
Plenty of free SEO tools exist, but you typically have to pay to access historical data or advanced features.
Here is the essential SEO software you’ll need to DIY:
Technical SEO issues can prevent search engines from finding or crawling your website.
Before investing heavily in content creation, work through some basic SEO checks so you’re not putting time and money into efforts that won’t bear any fruit.
Search engines like Google prioritize a mobile-first experience.
Sites with a poor mobile experience will have difficulty ranking in organic search.
Use Google’s mobile-friendliness tool to check whether your website passes.
When evaluating pages, search engines also favor pages that load quickly. (After all, no one should have to suffer through a slow-loading page.)
Use Google PageSpeed Insights to check your speed score on mobile and desktop and help diagnose issues.
If your pages score low, check your percentage of users on desktop vs. mobile in Google Analytics, and prioritize improvements based on these user behaviors.
When taking the DIY SEO route, building personas helps guide your keyword research and writing process to ensure your content resonates with the ideal audience.
Define your top 2-3 target personas to guide your SEO research and help prioritize high-value topics. Interview real clients that fit these profiles, and document their job roles, functions and goals, along with demographic information, pain points and other unifying characteristics.
Supplement with research in online forums like Quora, reddit or other online communities that your target audience frequents.
Having a clear perception of the ideal audience will allow you to create more specific, helpful content that satisfies a search’s true intent.
Starting with competitor research helps you understand what you’re up against, identify high-value content opportunities and prioritize activities to outsmart competitors.
Knowing competitor stats like organic keywords and monthly traffic also helps set realistic expectations and benchmarks for your own goals.
Document the following SEO data for your top 3-5 organic competitors, compared to your website:
Keyword research helps you understand search patterns and guides your content creation efforts.
Using a keyword research tool like SEMrush, search for keywords that most closely align with your product or service as well as pain points your personas experience most often.
Compile your research into a spreadsheet, and include search volume and ranking difficulty data to reference later.
You’ve defined your personas and their search behaviors and have a pulse on the competition.
Now, it’s time to develop a content and internal linking strategy that will fuel your SEO goals and add the most value possible to your audience.
Many DIY SEOs make the mistake of producing content to rank for individual keywords and skip this step altogether.
But search engines have evolved to understand how topics relate. To build a content strategy that will drive real value and SEO results, you need to think in terms of topics.
By taking a topic-based approach to SEO, you consider the intent behind the keyword, rather than the keyword itself. Instead of producing many similar pieces of content, you end up with fewer, longer-form pages.
When taking on SEO yourself, start by creating a topic cluster strategy to focus on building online authority for high purchase intent topics.
Prioritize a few primary keywords you want to rank for, and identify all the supporting questions and considerations a user would have.
Produce supporting subtopic pages that link to your topic page to organize your web pages around these core themes and signal authority to your top pages.
Over the years, SEOs can accumulate hundreds — even thousands — of pages that no longer serve a purpose.
It’s easy to put these pages in the back of your mind — but low-value or duplicate content can negatively impact SEO performance.
Google’s algorithm updates routinely aim to filter out low-value content, which should be reason enough to clean up your own website.
To stay ahead of content quality, keep a running list of your webpages. If they don’t produce traffic or serve a distinct purpose, consider 301-redirecting them to a relevant page.
Over time, your website will be chock-full of valuable pages that serve a particular goal.
Learn how to perform a content audit here.
To succeed with DIY SEO, you need a system to stay organized and hold your team accountable.
Organize your plans in a content calendar to put your audit and topic cluster strategy into action.
Include details like titles, keyword focus and intent, due dates, assignees and more so you have a clear roadmap for achieving your SEO goals.
You might have an airtight topic cluster strategy — but if the content on a page doesn’t deliver on its promise — your SEO efforts will fall flat.
Create detailed writing guidelines so content creators understand the expectations and requirements.
Include requirements for reputable outside research, meta tags, content length, structure, quality assurance and brand voice.
At a minimum, each page should have the following, optimized for that page’s primary keyword(s):
Looking for more tips? Check out our Guide to Writing SEO-Friendly Content.
Inbound links act as votes of confidence to your pages and domain.
Earning links from credible, high authority sites is essential for building SEO authority. After all, link signals account for 17.31% of search ranking factors, according to a 2017 Moz study.
Prioritize link-building efforts based on how you fare against competitors. Some tactics include:
While content plays a heavy role in search results, search algorithms weigh hundreds of onsite and offsite signals to deliver the most relevant search result.
And that includes page experience.
So much so that Google announced a future algorithm change that will favor sites that meet its specific page experience criteria — known as Core Web Vitals.
These metrics help set quality standards for user experience across the web and encourage sites to create more delightful web experiences across browsers and devices.
When planning SEO for your organization, check Core Web Vitals for your website in Search Console or PageSpeed Insights. Prioritize improvements to make before this 2021 algorithm update to ensure your website doesn’t fall off for any existing rankings.
When managing SEO in-house, it’s easy to focus on pumping out new content to fuel your marketing engine.
But as you plan content, don’t forget content that already exists.
Refreshing content typically takes less time than new content creation — and can help you generate results faster.
Start analyzing pages that have dropped in rankings for your top keywords or organic traffic, and compare these pages against top-ranking competitors. Look for opportunities to improve the content by adding new data, expanding on subtopics or organizing the information to better match the search intent.
Read our complete guide to content optimization.
Succeeding with SEO is a time-intensive process.
When taking on SEO yourself, it’s even more critical to create traffic goals and document performance to stay laser-focused on results.
While SEO forecasting isn’t an exact science, you can weigh these factors to help benchmark monthly organic traffic goals:
Before you can generate organic traffic, you need to earn rankings.
Organic rankings reflect the quality of your content and domain authority.
As you execute your SEO plan, monitor your keyword rankings weekly and monthly for major upward or downward movements.
Take note of top keywords that have lost or gained position 1-3 or page 1 rankings to improve upon and reverse negative trends.
Pay close attention to SERP features like featured snippets, too. These organic listings appear above the first search result and are critical SEO real estate. Always note the existing featured snippet for your target keywords, and structure your content accordingly.
DIY SEO isn't for the faint of heart. Producing content that outranks competitors, tracking performance and staying informed on algorithm updates is a labor of love.
Ultimately, your SEO efforts should return a high ROI in increased organic traffic, leads and revenue.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
If you’re investing in SEO without success, it might be time to look for outside help.
At Human, we help clients define and achieve their organic goals. We’ve built and trained an expert SEO team — including SEO strategists, content writers, editors, designers and developers — so you don’t have to.
Ready to produce tangible results from search engine optimization? Let’s chat!