The short answer is, yes you can do SEO on your own. But it’s a little like building your own car. When you think of the myriad skills that it requires, the years of training you would need, and the ability to complete the work… Why would you want to? While you are learning how to build it, others are already out there doing it.
The best case scenario is to learn enough SEO so you can direct your business-generated content and onsite optimization to complement the work of the SEO professionals you hired. If you are working in the same direction and not at cross purposes, your visibility campaign has a much greater chance of success.
The Basics of SEO – How to Optimize Your Website for Google Search
There are simple SEO-related measures a business/website owner can perform for success with SEO, whatever your business may be. SEO for medical practices follows many of the same principles as SEO for manufacturers.
For example, when creating a piece of content for your site, you could name the filename a keyword that receives actual search volume in your niche, and you could create an ALT tag that describes what the image is (another keyword opportunity).
You could create a relevant video for your Youtube channel and embed it onto the page. You could make sure a blog post has just one H1 tag, and that the H2 tags don’t repeat the same phrase (or keyword).
And finally, you could embed links in that blog post that link to pillar content on your website. This creates an important structure that search engines understand and respond to favorably.
These are simple, practical steps you could personally take that would make your page 90% more optimized than most of your competitors’ websites.
How hard is it to do SEO yourself?
There are simple, practical steps you can take for your own SEO. On their own, they do not constitute an organized campaign but rather, enhance what your SEO team is doing. Someone needs to be able to see the entire campaign from a high level.
In your business, you see an opportunity in your market and you fill the gap with your product or service. An SEO agency has similar insight into the search engines, i.e. who are your competitors and where are the weak spots? That requires experience to not only identify the weak spots but to know exactly what to do to replace that competitor with your business!
Long-term growth and regular website and offsite updates should be done by experts who have in-depth knowledge of the technical practices necessary for maintenance and ongoing content development. Your SEO team can do all the heavy lifting, generating a linking campaign back to the site where Google and Bing pick up your new content and see that it is indeed relevant and well-optimized, and the search engines reward it with higher placement.
Do I need to hire someone to do SEO?
If you are intent on running your business and growing it, then you need to be able to spend time on that endeavor — not running the SEO campaign which can be a full-time commitment on its own.
If you’re still not convinced, let’s break it down further:
- Do you know the keywords people are actively searching for in your niche? Which are the low competition / high volume opportunities? Which keywords have buyer intent?
- In the top 10 listings, what are the weaknesses where you could overtake a competitor?
- What are the number and types of links that are working in your niche to secure those rankings? Who’s writing the content and placing those links? What phrase(s) are you using to link back to your site?
- Who is optimizing the content and sourcing the images? Do you have a clear license to use those assets?
It sounds overwhelming, and yet, we are merely scratching the surface of what is needed to run a successful SEO campaign. There is a competitor analysis that takes place for every keyword you are targeting. And then priorities must be decided upon, work divided, and a sequence of events takes place. The “campaign” is really an umbrella term that takes into account a number of simultaneous campaigns, each with its own criteria and sequence.
While all that is taking place, Google is updating its algorithm almost constantly. While you are working on your plan, you are also keeping an eye on any changes that have occurred. Your competitors are also working to grow their business and visibility in search engines. Your rankings are changing. There are ongoing adjustments that need to be made based on all the new information.
You have a business to run. Let us help you with SEO!