How to do SEO for your website yourself

Have you considered optimizing your website on your own, without turning to professionals? In this article, we will explore all the nuances of independent optimization, highlight the difficulties you may face, and discuss whether it’s worth handling such tasks yourself. We hope our guide will help you promote your website. But if it all seems too complicated, feel free to contact our company — we’ll be happy to assist you with website optimization.

Step-by-step guide to optimizing your website yourself

To bring your website to the top of search results effectively, you need to clearly understand what you are doing and why. Let’s go through each stage step by step and take a closer look.

Step 0. Checking the website for technical errors

Yes, this is the first thing you should do before trying to improve your website’s search ranking. If the website is slow or doesn’t function properly, all other efforts will be pointless.

Here’s a simple checklist you can follow yourself:

1. Check the loading speed of key pages on your website using the free service from Google. It will also provide recommendations on how to improve performance. 
2. For comprehensive website checks on a regular basis, you should connect Google Search Console to your site — we have detailed instructions on how to do this. With this panel, you can:
   1. check the correctness of the robots.txt and sitemap.xml files (if you already have them, read how to sitemap here);
   2. detect broken pages (pages with a 404 Not Found response code);
   3. identify server issues (when there are a large number of pages with a 505 response code);
   4. check the correctness of the mobile version of the site and much more.
3. Check your site's indexing. To do this, use the Google site: operator. How to use it: type site:https://site.com into the search engine. The results will show all the pages of your site that have already been indexed. If important pages, such as the home page or categories, are not in the index, this is a warning sign. Check whether your site has been banned by the search engine. You can read more about this in our article. 
4. Check for errors in the website layout. This can be done using convenient validators, such as this one. If there are any errors, you need to report them to the developer who created your website. 
5. Check that the site displays correctly in different browsers and at different screen resolutions. 

Technical analysis is a complex process that requires specific knowledge and experience. Without them, doing SEO optimization on your own can lead to critical mistakes that will undermine all subsequent efforts. If you have a large website with many pages, such as an online store, we strongly recommend seeking professional help — managing an online store’s SEO on your own is an extremely difficult task. The internet marketing agency Idea Digital Agency offers various SEO services, including website audits. Based on the results, you will receive a detailed report outlining the identified errors and offering options for resolving them. 

Step 1. Competitor analysis

Competitor analysis is one of the first and most important steps in the process of internal website optimization. It allows you not only to understand what strategies and tactics your competitors use to achieve high positions in search results, but also to identify weaknesses that you can turn into advantages.

How to conduct an analysis?

1. Identifying competitors: Start by identifying the main competitors in your niche. These may include direct competitors selling similar products or services, as well as those ranking highly for key queries relevant to your business.
2. Content analysis: Evaluate the topics and content formats used by competitors. Pay attention to publication frequency, text length, keywords used, as well as the structure and design of the materials.
3. SEO metrics analysis:Use tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Serpstat to analyze external links pointing to competitors’ websites. This will help you understand which resources link to them and allow you to try to obtain links from the same sites.
4. Technical condition assessment: Technical optimization plays a key role in SEO. Analyze how quickly competitors’ websites load, how well they are adapted for mobile devices, and how effectively their URLs are structured.

Studying competitors’ websites will help you create a strategy that incorporates successful practices and avoids their mistakes. This will increase your chances of securing strong positions in search results.

Step 2. Building the semantic core

Semantics is an important part of website optimization, so you should devote maximum attention to building it. The set of search queries that describe the product, service, or information you provide is called the semantic core (SC). You can collect it using various services:

• Serpstat;
• Keyword Planner;
• SemRush:
• KeyCollector and others.

With these tools, you can easily optimize your website yourself. However, when collecting semantics, it is essential to determine the main informational purpose of the pages for which you will be gathering search queries. The more accurately you define it, the more targeted traffic you will attract and the higher the likelihood of a conversion, such as submitting an application.

What should you pay attention to when collecting? First and foremost, frequency. 

Frequency indicates how many times a query has been searched for in the past month. The higher the frequency, the more difficult it will be to reach the top, since competition is also higher. It is better to focus on lower-frequency queries — it will be easier to achieve top rankings with them.

If you are optimizing your project for Ukraine, collect keywords specific to Ukraine. For English-language websites, study the semantics of the countries where you plan to promote your site — any service can be easily configured to gather keywords for a specific country.

When compiling SEO for your website, don’t forget to analyze competitors. Study their semantics, especially those in the TOP 5 for the queries most relevant to you. 

Step 3. Working with the website menu

Before you try to get your site to the top of Google on your own, make sure your potential customers are comfortable using it. The more convenient your site is for users, the higher the likelihood of conversions — such as ordering a service, purchasing a product, or requesting a callback. This applies not only to specific design decisions but also to the website menu itself 

What to check:

• Do the menu item names match the content on their pages?
• Are the pages correctly grouped into categories and subcategories?
• How many levels of nesting are in your menu? Try to avoid overly long nesting chains (more than three levels).

When creating a new category, make sure it has appropriate semantics. If there is no relevant semantics, it will be much more difficult to bring such a category to the top. 

Step 4. Working with website content

Safe website optimization on your own should include very careful and deliberate work with content. You can’t just take all the collected keywords and paste them in one big block at the bottom of the page — that approach was relevant in the early days of the Internet and Google. Today, this can easily get you banned or pushed out of search results.

Google’s top priority is to provide users with the highest-quality, most comprehensive, and most relevant information. Therefore, when learning how to optimize your website yourself — and especially when working with content — focus on the following indicators:

1. Quality. First and foremost, your texts must be original, so make sure they are unique. Equally important is the spam factor — oversaturation of the text with keywords. You can check these indicators using many free and paid services. Just type «check text for uniqueness» into Google and you’ll get a whole list of tools. Quality also refers to the content itself: write for people, include your personal experience in articles, and make them as useful as possible for users. Google values this type of content. 
2. Keywords. Use the collected search queries to optimize your texts — this is how users will be able to find your article through a search engine. But be careful when adding keywords: self-optimization should be done thoughtfully and with caution. To avoid overspam, we recommend following this formula: one keyword per 500 characters (excluding spaces). Try to place them evenly and organically. 
3. Headings and subheadings. When it comes to blogs, give your article a strong, eye-catching title — it should engage users and make them want to read further. Avoid sensationalist or misleading headlines; don’t mislead readers, and use the most frequent keywords from the collected semantics. Subheadings make the text more readable by dividing it into meaningful sections. Add H2 and H3 subheadings every 500–700 characters, following the hierarchy (H1–H2–H3). Other pages of the website should also include headings, with only ONE H1 per page, and additional subheadings of other levels as needed.
4. References. Another important point to consider when optimizing your website without the help of specialists is internal linking. Add links to other pages of your website within the text — this helps search engine bots index new pages faster and understand your site’s structure. Link pages in a chain: the first to the second, the second to the third, the third to the fourth, and so on. Place more links to important pages (homepage, categories, subcategories). Be cautious with external links — give preference to verified and reliable sources, such as Wikipedia. 
5. Images. Where possible, images should be unique and not «heavy.» When adding images to a page, always include ALT text. Write it based on the collected search queries — this way, your images can appear in Google Images for relevant queries, increasing the likelihood of users clicking through to your page. 

Step 5. Regular page optimization

Once the main stages of internal optimization are completed, it’s important to remember that work on the website doesn’t end there. Regular page optimization is an ongoing process required to maintain the site’s position in search results and adapt to changes in search engine algorithms.

How to perform re-optimization?

1. Monitoring positions: Constantly monitor your website’s positions for key search queries. This will help you quickly spot any ranking drops and take the necessary steps to restore them.
2. Content updates: The content on your website should be up to date and relevant to user queries. Regularly review your pages to ensure they align with current trends, and update them by adding new data, images, or videos.
3. Improving user experience: Analyze metrics related to user interaction with the site, such as time on page, bounce rate, and the number of link clicks. Make adjustments aimed at improving these metrics.
4. Technical improvements: Over time, search engines may introduce new technical requirements. Regularly check your website for errors, loading speed issues, and mobile compatibility, and fix them.

Regular re-optimization helps the site stay competitive, maintain and improve its search rankings, and meet the requirements of both users and search engines.

External optimization

Optimizing your website on your own must include working with its link profile.
A link profile is a collection of external links pointing to pages on your website. It is important that the websites linking to you have a high level of trust from search engines. This way, part of their «authority» is passed to your site, which ultimately has a positive effect on SEO.

Links can be:

• Anchor links — the link is placed behind an anchor (keyword).
• Unanchored links — the link is shown in the text exactly as it is, or hidden behind words such as «here,» «follow the link,» «click here,» etc.

Before optimizing your website for search engines, keep in mind that non-anchor links should predominate in your link profile, with an approximate ratio of 70/30.

Let’s look at the options for obtaining links. 

Permanent links

You may have already read some articles on how to do SEO yourself and seen this term used. But what does it mean? Backlinks usually refer to links placed within articles. In the West, these are called guest posts, and you can often get them completely free — the key is to negotiate with the platform and provide truly interesting, high-quality content. In our market, you can buy permanent links: many websites offer this service and even have fixed price lists. You can find such platforms directly in search results by entering relevant keywords, but then you’ll need to email each site owner to find out whether they accept guest articles and, if so, under what conditions. 

You can also use intermediary platforms that offer link placement on various websites for a small commission. This approach will be useful if you have decided to start promoting a new website on your own and have no idea where to look for links. 

Permanent links are the most powerful, but what if you don’t have enough time to negotiate free placements or the budget to pay for links?

Crowd

Crowd links (from the English word «crowd») look like natural recommendations on forums, containing links to pages on your website. In other words, they function as word of mouth. Post such recommendations carefully and unobtrusively. Make the links visible — don’t hide them behind keywords, but use them alongside them. This will make your comment look as natural as possible.

Forum links are a great way to diversify your link profile and generate traffic. In addition, you can easily do this yourself and even for free — in this case, doing SEO for your website is much simpler.

But don’t spam identical comments across all forums and topics — it’s much better if your recommendation is relevant to the discussion.

Catalogues

If you are considering doing SEO yourself without investment, start with directories. First, most directories offer free listings, like SEO List. . Second, this will increase your business’s visibility in regional search results: users will see your company among others for queries related to a specific city, region, or country.

Your link profile should be diverse. Use different types of links to send positive signals to search engines. 

Is it realistic to get your website to the top in 2024?

In 2024, SEO optimization has become even more complex and requires advanced knowledge and skills. However, DIY SEO is still possible, especially for small and medium-sized businesses with limited budgets.

Advantages of DIY SEO:

1. Cost savings: You don’t spend money on agency fees but invest your time and effort instead.
2. Flexibility: You can make changes to the website at any time and quickly respond to changes in search engine algorithms.
3. Deep understanding of your business: Doing SEO yourself helps you better understand your audience and their needs. 

DIY SEO can be successful if you are willing to invest time and effort in learning and consistently working on your website. Otherwise, it may be better to consider working with professionals.

Difficulties and disadvantages of doing SEO on your own

Doing SEO on your own can be frustrating, and there are several reasons for this:

• High competition, especially in niches where the top 10 sites are regularly optimized by entire teams of experienced specialists.
  
  
• A lack of creative and unique ideas to help you stand out from other websites, which can lead to stagnation when your efforts fail to deliver results.
  
  
• Constant changes in search engine algorithms can seriously hurt your traffic — without knowledge and experience, you may not immediately understand what happened or how to fix it.
• Getting your site to the top of search results on your own takes a lot of time, especially in the early stages.
• Without experience, it’s easy to make mistakes that can result in search engine penalties and a loss of rankings.

Our step-by-step guide to optimizing your website yourself will undoubtedly be useful, but it’s important to realistically assess your capabilities. If you see that competition in your niche is too strong or you cannot devote enough time to promotion, consider working with a specialist. 

Advantages of turning to an agency for SEO services

Proper search engine optimization can bring your business even more profit, while incorrect optimization can result in your website being penalized or even blocked. The best solution is to turn to professionals. Why?

1. Experience. People who have been working in SEO for many years have already experienced dozens of search engine updates, can identify the cause of a problem in just a few clicks, and act with confidence. Promoting a project on your own is often like walking through a minefield. If you don’t want to cause damage, put your website in reliable hands. 
2. Knowledge. Professionals are familiar with numerous optimization nuances because they regularly update their skills. As a result, they clearly understand which strategies will be effective and which will not in each specific case. This is especially important when working with Western markets. Order SEO promotion of English-language websites from an agency if you don't want to waste all your money. 

Multidisciplinarity. Agencies often employ not only SEO specialists but also content managers, link builders, copywriters, designers, and developers. Such a team is capable of handling a wide range of tasks in the shortest possible time.