Starting out in business is a difficult path usually for everyone. There is always a cost involved in everything when setting up a business so I know its tempting for DIY SEO. Is DIY SEO even possible? Yes it is possible but you have to follow the rules of SEO and don’t expect miracles.

Do not expect to build your website and then get results and traffic in a matter of weeks. Even seasoned SEO professionals cannot guarantee organic traffic in weeks. Google and its indexing and algorithms take time, after all there are hundreds of millions of websites all wanting the same results. Page one of google, the holy grail of SEO

Where To Start With DIY SEO

Even before you start building your website get a pen and paper. Write down everything you want to achieve in the first instance. Are you selling a service or a product as a business. Is it just a blog to generate traffic to make money from google Adsense and affiliate links. How do you envisage ultimately making money from your site.

I have had my fair share of sites and I have made this mistake a few times. The sites been built in haste and then the content and pages around it. Consequently not giving much thought to site structure and SEO. Having read lots of SEO articles I thought it would be straight forward doing DIY SEO. I had some success and then lots of failures.

Choosing The Domain Name

Ideally the domain name needs to be a keyword in itself, however there are many successful sites that buck the trend. If at all possible then get a keyword domain name when doing your DIY SEO. Be warned though the difficulty of the Keyword itself, don’t aim too high unless you have a lot of cash to throw at it.

Yes of course you want something that has a number of searches per month. One of my choices was a term that had 3k searches per month. Good traffic I though, however the site that ranks top for the exact same term is ranked 150th in the UK according to Alexa. The traffic to that said site is in the millions per month and is a national institution. Guess what I am not even close to the first page for the search term. The position is around 50 so a big fail.

So choose your domain name based around keywords of your business but ensure that the competition is not out of reach. Especially when doing DIY SEO.

The Keyword Research Tools

There has been hundreds of articles on keyword research and I’m sure there will be more. However you don’t need all the bells and whistle’s when doing DIY SEO. You need to know the basic information around a keyword. How many searches per month does that keyword have. Whats the difficulty of that keyword and what sites already rank for that keyword.

Never write an article before doing keyword research. Always ensure that people are searching for what you are about to write. If people are not searching that topic then there is no point in writing about it.

Of course you then need to know how much authority those sites that rank for those keywords. Once you know the authority for those sites then you can decide if you can rank on page one eventually. Be realistic especially if this is your first time at DIY SEO.

Ubersuggest Keyword Research

Thank you Neil Patel for bringing a great DIY SEO tool to the masses for free. Yes I said its a free keyword research tool and a very good one at that. If you haven’t heard of Neil Patel then I suggest you pop over to his blog and his podcasts and digest it all. One of the giants in the world of SEO and he is happy to share his lifelong knowledge as well.

The Ubersuggest keyword research tool gives you all the information that you need to start your DIY SEO.

Keyword Case Study

If you take a typical keyword such as “Boxer Dog” there is over 27 thousand searches per month for that term. If you look at the top spot by “Hillspet” you will it gets one 8 thousand visits from that 1 keyword. Now starting out on your DIY SEO journey you are never even going to stand a chance for that search term. This site has age, domain authority and trust. This is a site that has had a lot of attention from the professionals.

In fact you would struggle to even get to page 2 or 3 so you have to go more long tail keyword. Perhaps “boxer dog collar” would be an easier term to link to.

Extending The Keyword

Boxer dog collar may only have 50 searches a month but the goal is to get onto page one on your DIY SEO quest. It may be difficult to out rank EBay on that term but if you look further down to position 8. All about boxer dog breed the domain score is only 18 and that’s achievable. The sites above are not that high in domain score either.

So this just might be achievable if you produce some informative content around the keywords “Boxer Dog Collar”. A single post writing about the different types of boxer dog collar. Is there a particular good collar for showing your boxer, another one for general walking the dog, is there one more suitable for training etc. Mention all the good points the bad points and value for money. Make the post so informative that the reader does not have to go anywhere else to find information on the best boxer dog collar.

SEO Errors On Boxer Dog Breed

A quick glance using some basic SEO tools will show if the site you are competing against has any errors or not. This particular site doesn’t even have and text on the home page with H1 tags. H1 tags are considered to be the most important signal to goggle telling it what the page is about. It would have been simple to put on the home page BOXER DOG in H1.

The meta description of the home page is too long and it looks very spammy indeed. So there are flaws in the site so this makes it an achievable target for DIY SEO. Of course once you have done all the important on page SEO you have to create some backlinks to your site. Also you will need to link it internally to show the importance and relevancy in your site

The Tools Needed For DIY SEO

Clients work to do now but please pop back as I update the post to include the free SEO tools that I use