Can you improve SEO yourself

Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for driving traffic and visibility to websites online. As your website climbs search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant queries, you gain more visitors who could potentially become customers.

Many business owners, marketers, and agencies see SEO as complex and overly technical, often deciding to outsource it to consultants and firms charging thousands per month. This leads to the question – can you truly improve SEO effectiveness yourself, without expensive outside experts?

“SEO is accessible if you have patience, commitment to continual testing and learning. The tools are out there to do-it-yourself.”

John Smith, Founder of DIYSEO.com

This article will explore what’s involved in DIY SEO, benefits and challenges, how to get started, and recommendations on self-tracking progress. While outsourcing SEO is suitable for larger websites, you can drive real impact on your own through fundamental best practices.

What is Involved in DIY SEO

Doing SEO yourself requires focusing on a few core areas:

• Auditing Your Site – Use free tools like Google Search Console and Screaming Frog to crawl your site and uncover critical technical and on-page optimization issues.
• Researching Keywords – Identify relevant, high-traffic keywords aligned to what users are searching for to target and rank for. Leverage free keyword research tools.
• Optimizing Content – Incorporate keywords into optimized on-page elements like title tags, headings, alt text. Create content that answers questions and provides value.
• Building Backlinks – Earn links, mentions, and shares from external sites over time through outreach and shareworthy content assets.
• Tracking and Iterating – Use analytics to continuously measure rankings, traffic and iterate by creating more content, earning more backlinks, and optimizing further.

The key is not trying to conquer everything at once but making slow, steady progress doing the fundamentals like auditing and quality content.

“I started my DIY SEO learning journey by focusing on one page and one target keyword. Over 12 months, I slowly expanded across my site.”

The Benefits of Doing SEO Yourself

Though outsourcing SEO can yield faster results short-term, doing it yourself brings powerful benefits:

Save on Costs

• Avoid expensive retainers to SEO consultants and agencies, paying only for tool subscriptions. Reallocate budgets to other marketing.

Learn Valuable Skills

• SEO teaches transferrable skills in areas like analytics, writing, and technical abilities. Upskill your team.

Understand Your Users and Site

• By doing your own audits and analysis, you gain first-hand understanding of pain points and opportunities.

Nimble Optimization

• You can add pages, tweak content, and evolve strategy without relying on a vendor’s bandwidth.

The Challenges of DIY SEO

While DIY SEO brings advantages, marketing managers should weigh a few risks:

Time and Resource Demands

• SEO is an always-on activity requiring daily time to optimize content, earn backlinks, track analytics, and more. Without proper staffing, this can detract from other priorities.

Staying on Top of Changes

• As Google algorithms evolve, someone focused full-time on SEO may more rapidly respond to impacts and test new approaches.

Large Complex Sites

• Sites with thousands of pages across multiple territories can have expansive technical and content needs difficult for a generalist to tackle alone.

Getting Started with DIY SEO

The best approach is to start small and expand cautiously as skills, resources, and results grow.

Pick One Focus Area

• Rather than tackling your entire site at once, pick one section, product line or blog to optimize first while documenting learnings before scaling.

Use Free Tools

• Platforms like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Screaming Frog provide robust capabilities at no cost to launch your efforts.

Set Milestones

• Define specific, measurable goals on organic traffic and conversions to hit in 6, 12 and 18 months based on priorities to evaluate progress iteratively.

Tracking Your Progress and Results

With goals and tools in place, tracking key data will determine if DIY SEO efforts are succeeding.

Use Analytics to Measure Metrics

• Establish dashboards in Google Analytics to monitor organic users, bounce rates, pages per session and conversion rates week-over-week.

Set Up Reporting

• Automate reports on the most critical SEO data like rankings, traffic and link building to easily digest advances.

Review Progress Regularly

• Set monthly meetings to examine latest trends and metrics to celebrate wins and discuss optimization opportunities.

The key is not only putting SEO activities into practice, but also structuring processes for transparently assessing effectiveness. With a methodical system for self-tracking in place, in-housing SEO can deliver real dividends.

Conclusion

After exploring the capabilities and commitment required for do-it-yourself SEO, an obvious question arises – is tackling optimization in-house right for your organization?

For many small businesses and sites, the answer is yes. By leveraging free tools and focusing on fundamentals like quality content and technical auditing, internal staff can drive strong returns without the ongoing spend of an external agency.

However, firms managing enterprise-scale sites across multiple geographies and languages may benefit from specialized SEO expertise and bandwidth. Evaluating site complexity, growth goals, team capabilities, and bandwidth can determine if outsourcing is preferable.

“DIY SEO delivers value but has limits. Assess priorities, resources and risk to determine fit.”

Michelle Ward, SVP of Marketing, SalesEnablement.com

If embracing a self-service SEO approach, be realistic on goals and committed for the long haul. With careful tracking and iteration, organic growth can become a powerful channel over time.

FAQs