DIY SEO

One thing is for certain in this post covid world – SEO (or Local SEO) is essential for any business that wants to grow.

Companies who take SEO seriously are dominating in their local area.

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

The work of search engine optimisation involves everything that makes your website more visible to prospective customers who are search for services like yours. This ranges from fairly simple tasks like managing your local Google My Business Listing, adding good quality content, improving internal links and adding your site to directories to complex technical back end tasks.

Organic traffic is so valuable and unlike ads, once your site is optimised for Google search, it is the gift that keeps on giving. Best of all, organic traffic gives you customers who are pro-active about buying your product and are looking for someone like you.

The confusion often lies in not understanding the difference between the types of SEO. For local businesses, the first point to understand that Local SEO is completely different from Organic SEO. Read more in our article What is Local SEO?

SEO is often dismissed by local companies because it seems too hard or too expensive to bother trying to compete but you absolutely can compete locally. Google gives you your own playground which is a more level field than organic rankings.

Should you Attempt Your Own SEO?

Should you install your own boiler or kitchen? Should you do your own book-keeping and accounts? Should you service your own car? You can do all of these things if you’re willing to take the time to learn.  The trouble is as small business owners, we are used to doing everything ourselves at the start, often working much longer hours in the pursuit of so-called freedom that we left employment for.

If you want to grow your business, everything that you do that takes time away from the ‘real work’ potentially slows your growth. At some point, you have to start delegating the tasks that do not move you nearer to your goals.

If you’ve been sitting at home unable to work because of lockdown, that may have been a great time to learn search engine optimisation or other marketing techniques. However, if you are working it’s unlikely that you have the time during. the normal working day so will attempt it in the evening. There are always further demands on your time so the chances of being consistent with your SEO are minimal.

How long does SEO take?

The amount of time that SEO will take you depends on how many pages you have, what you want to achieve, how quickly you want to achieve it and what needs doing. To see what’s involved in an SEO campaign visit: What is Local SEO?

It also helps to have the facilities to monitor and measure. Subscriptions to these can add up to hundreds of pounds per month. This is justified for professionals who monitor several sites but isn’t when you’re only optimising one site. If you haven’t already started monitoring your website get started by understanding Google Analytics.

Some sites are bogged down by performance issues that must be cleaned up before the site has a chance to rank. Google and other search engines assess around 200 factors when it decides which website to serve up to the searcher. Some of those factors include user experience. This means that even if you have the best answer for the query, search engines may not rank your website because using it is not a good experience for the searcher.

Understand How Search Engines Work.

Understanding how search engines work will save you a bit of time. If, later on, you decide to hire an SEO professional, they should start with keyword planning. If your pages URLs are not keyword-friendly, they may create new pages and redirect the old pages so that the URL, page title, meta title and meta description all support the keyword. They will then optimise the content with the keyword in an H1 tag and further supported in other headings and the content. You will have done no harm in the meantime. You can at least start with off page SEO if you have no access to your site.

Examples of SEO work for clients. 

To give you an idea of what’s involved, below is a description of the work that we do for two of our clients at opposite ends of the small business market. Local SEO differs from national SEO. Often, local clients only need a small number of good quality local visitors a week where a national business like Everest relies on several thousand, and Amazon would require several million.

This site was a bit different from what we usually see. It is built on Joomla and is 9 years old. It wasn’t built for SEO and it had about 300 pages of thin content. Some of the pages only had one photo and one line of text. None of the URLs had the keyword in and the images were too big and had no alt tags. Images were being indexed as URLs causing Google to crawl 1,200 pages when only about 50 were valid. We’ve reduced the pages to 102 including ten we’ve added. We’ve added approximately 20,00 words so far to existing content. Created a new menu which meant redirects to all the new URLs.

Client Case Study 2. Garage Doors. 

This client was our first ever SEO client. We were already working with him for sales training but when COVID hit, his needs changed and the priority became finding clients.

He also had an old site but it was dreadful and was only generating garage door repair enquiries. In 7 years it had gained no authority and was ugly and slow. The original developers refused to hand it over and there was no choice but to start again. New sites always take a little while to gain traction but in the first week, it was in the map pack for garage doors in his area.

In the year that we’ve been working with this client, he gains rankings every month. He is in the Dominator management plan so we just work on his site for 10 hours per week. We manage his Google My Business listing and add content to his site.

The site was built for SEO so we do not need to work on anything technical.

When he came to us, he worked with one fitter and mostly managed the sales visits in the evening. Now he has two teams of fitters and is able to concentrate on Sales.

Usually, ten hours a month is enough for steady growth. The first month usually needs some technical work. We think of it as clearing the weeds to allow for growth.

Start With a Free Local SEO Audit.

Every client is different so before we work with anyone, we conduct an audit to see how well the website performs in local search and Google My Business. We also look at listings consistency, page performance including page speed and how it fares in organic ranking. We can see quite a lot without having access to your site. This enables us to be very clear about what work is involved depending on what you want to achieve.

Before you decide whether you want to DIY SEO or hire a professional, let us conduct a free audit for you. It really is free and without any obligation. It will give you a very clear picture of your site. Most business owners have no idea what is happening on their website and it’s no more than a static brochure online.

It will also show you what your meta titles and descriptions are. Let us know that you are working on it yourself and we’ll keep you in the system and run a new report a month after you’ve made the changes. No charge. We’ll even tell you what you need to do. Our customers are those who don’t have time to optimise their websites themselves but we’re passionate about helping local business, so are happy to help.

The question is not ‘Can you do your own SEO?’ but ‘Should you do your own SEO?’

Note from the Author – Sian Wood

The difference between most SEO professionals and us is our understanding of the homeowner as a consumer and how local marketing differs from national. I’ve worked in the home improvement business for over 30 years, including owning my own business.  I’m personally involved in the strategy for all clients with the support of creative and technical experts.

What our clients say they like most about us is that they can hand it over and leave it to us. We don’t ask you for content, although it’s always good if you can supply photos related to the work you do. We just get on with the job and leave you to concentrate on growing your business.