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How to do SEO Yourself: 8 DIY SEO Tips

Learn how to do SEO yourself with these DIY SEO tips to boost your ranking and increase traffic and conversions.

Trusted By Industry Leaders
Trusted By Industry Leaders

Whether you’re a small business owner looking to boost organic traffic or you’re looking to get started in the world of digital marketing, learning how to do SEO isn’t just a valuable skill to have; it’s a necessity. 

At the same time, trying to wrap your head around keyword research, content optimization, and technical issues can be a challenge for even the most dedicated and ambitious marketer or entrepreneur. 

The good news is, this guide is here to help with practical, actionable tips on how to do your own SEO. 

Here’s What You’ll Learn: 

  • How to do a site audit and get a concrete foundation on your rank, as well as who your competitors are.
  • How to research keywords while creating and optimizing content for the best possible results.
  • How to handle technical SEO even if you’re not a programming wiz.

Discover a suite of best-in-class editorial tools with the Originality.ai Grammar Checker, AI Checker, and Content Optimizer.

1. Audit Your Site & Check Metrics

You can’t expect to succeed with DIY SEO if you don’t know where you’re starting from or who you’re up against. 

That’s why the very first step, before you even research a single keyword or optimize a single piece of content, is to get a baseline of where you are versus where you want to be. 

  • The first step should always be to install Google Analytics on your site to track traffic and user behavior. 
  • Then, connect your site to Google Search Console as well. 
  • This will tell you if Google has encountered any critical issues or crawling problems as it explores your site. 

From there, you’ll want to use tools to crawl your site. These tools will let you know if there are any broken links, duplicate content, missing meta tags or slow-loading pages. 

Note the following metrics to establish a baseline that you can improve over time

  • Organic traffic
  • Bounce rate
  • Average session duration
  • Keyword rankings 

2. Check Out Your Competitors

Next, it’s time to check out what the competition is up to. Search for your target keywords and list the top-ranking websites. 

Use keyword research tools to help you spot which keywords your competition is using, what their backlink profiles look like, and what sort of content strategies they’re using. 

This information will help you find gaps in their content where you can outperform them. 

3. Conduct Detailed Keyword Research

Once you have a solid baseline of what you’re working with (and who your competition is), it’s time to start doing keyword research

One of the best keyword strategies is to use topic clustering and target long-tail keywords

You can use online tools like AnswerthePublic or Google’s “People Also Ask” to help you brainstorm topics as well as see what questions people are asking that you can help answer.

Then, look at important metrics like search volume and keyword difficulty. By focusing on long-tail keywords, you’ll have a better chance of ranking well and then building on that rank over time. 

Don’t forget to group your keywords by search intent (informational, navigational, transactional) to make sure your content matches what people are looking for.  

It's a good idea to keep your keyword research in a spreadsheet where you can map each keyword to specific pages or content ideas. 

Create columns for

  • Search volume
  • Difficulty/Competition
  • Search Intent
  • Target URL

This will help you stay organized, especially as you continue to add pages over time. 

4. A Quick Technical SEO Intro

Let’s take a quick look at some technical SEO tips for DIY SEO:

  • Clear, easy-to-follow site architecture: make it as easy as possible for people and the search engines to find your content.
  • Keep your URLs short and descriptive: so that readers can tell at first glance what your page is about. 
  • Consult a web developer if you’re unsure: they can evaluate whether your site is mobile responsive and use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to test how quickly your page loads on various devices.
  • Create a sitemap: so that search engines have an easier time crawling and ranking your content. 

While that’s just a brief overview of technical SEO, it can help you get started on the right path to creating a more optimized site.

5. On-Page Optimization Made Easy

The next step of the process involves optimizing the content you already have to make it rank as best as it can:

  • Write unique, keyword-rich title tags that are around 50-60 characters.
  • Write engaging meta descriptions of 150-160 characters.
  • Follow a logical page structure and use H1 for the page title, as well as H2 and H3 for the subtopics.
  • Focus on writing in-depth, well-researched content and check it for readability.
  • Add keywords naturally, so they don’t distract from the content.
  • Link internally to other, relevant pages to help readers navigate easily to related content.

Originality.ai’s Content Optimizer can help you streamline content optimization and make genuine content improvements with intelligent AI-powered SEO insights and tips. Plus, it’s resistant to manipulation tactics like keyword stuffing.

6. Creating and Optimizing Your Content

Creating great content takes work, so it’s a good idea to create a content calendar you can work with. 

Schedule in:

  • Regular updates
  • Blog posts and articles 
  • Guides
  • Videos
  • Infographics
  • Podcasts

In particular, you’ll also want to focus on creating evergreen content; that is, content that continues to be relevant over time. 

You may need to update it periodically, but the underlying message doesn’t usually change much. Make sure to share your content on social media and elsewhere, aiming to earn backlinks from reputable sites in your niche to help boost your backlink profile. 

7. Off-Page SEO and Link Building

Speaking of backlinks, part of DIY SEO is having a backlink strategy and taking care of your off-page SEO. 

With this in mind, there are lots of ways to earn reputable backlinks. You can reach out to influencers or industry experts for collaboration, or create newsworthy stories and submit a press release (with the bonus being that you may get even more media attention as a result!). 

One of the best ways to earn those backlinks, since these people get pitched quite often and may not reply, is to take the time to do the research or find out the information that people want to know in your niche, in depth. 

8. Monitoring Analytics and What Happens Next

Once you’re all set up with your DIY SEO, it’s just a matter of rinsing and repeating these options periodically to see how your site is performing with metrics like traffic, bounce rate, session duration and conversion goals. 

There are plenty of SEO tools out there which can also help you monitor your keywords and domain authority, including SEMrush and Ahreefs. 

You’ll want to periodically do detailed content audits to spot any slow-loading pages, broken links or other issues that can detract from your ranking. 

Also, this is the perfect time to explore conversion optimization and A/B testing. 

Split testing different parts of your page, such as different headlines or page layouts, can help you see what resonates more with your ideal customer. You may be surprised by the results! 

Keep in mind, too, that search engine algorithms and SEO trends are always changing and evolving with the times. What works this month may be old news the next. It’s a good idea to keep up with industry-leading blogs to stay up-to-date and make adjustments and course-correct if need be. 

Remember, SEO is Never Done

This list of DIY SEO tips sounds like a tall order to fill, but when you break it down into individual steps, it’s easy to start and make excellent progress on your search engine ranking strategy. 

As you keep creating new content and seeing what resonates with your ideal audience, you may find that they prefer certain types of content over others. 

The key is to look at what your metrics are telling you, for example: 

  • Has traffic been steadily increasing, stagnant, or declining over the last 30 days? 
  • Which pages have unusually high bounce rates? What’s happening to cause it? 
  • What are the most common paths that users are taking to land on key pages?
  • Which keywords have gained/lost rankings recently? Does that correlate with changes in traffic? 
  • Are my top-performing keywords still aligned with users’ search intent?
  • Are there long-tail keywords we haven’t targeted yet?


By keeping these points in mind, you’ll have the knowledge and action plan you need to turn DIY SEO into better rankings and higher-converting content. 

Get a best-in-class suite of tools for your content marketing strategy! Check out Originality.ai’s Predictive SEO Tool, AI Checker, Plagiarism Checker, and Grammar Checker.

Then, discover more content marketing best practices in our top guides:

Sherice Jacob

Sherice Jacob is a seasoned copywriter and content professional fluent in English, Spanish, and Catalan, with over 25 years of experience crafting high-converting copy. Passionate about AI, she enjoys exploring the new innovations and possibilities it brings to the world of content creation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to fill out the entire form?

No, that’s one of the benefits, only fill out the areas which you think will be relevant to the prompts you require.

Why is the English so poor for some prompts?

When making the tool we had to make each prompt as general as possible to be able to include every kind of input. Not to worry though ChatGPT is smart and will still understand the prompt.

In The Press

Originality.ai has been featured for its accurate ability to detect GPT-3, Chat GPT and GPT-4 generated content. See some of the coverage below…

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Featured by Leading Publications

Originality.ai did a fantastic job on all three prompts, precisely detecting them as AI-written. Additionally, after I checked with actual human-written textual content, it did determine it as 100% human-generated, which is important.

Vahan Petrosyan

searchenginejournal.com

I use this tool most frequently to check for AI content personally. My most frequent use-case is checking content submitted by freelance writers we work with for AI and plagiarism.

Tom Demers

searchengineland.com

After extensive research and testing, we determined Originality.ai to be the most accurate technology.

Rock Content Team

rockcontent.com

Jon Gillham, Founder of Originality.ai came up with a tool to detect whether the content is written by humans or AI tools. It’s built on such technology that can specifically detect content by ChatGPT-3 — by giving you a spam score of 0-100, with an accuracy of 94%.

Felix Rose-Collins

ranktracker.com

ChatGPT lacks empathy and originality. It’s also recognized as AI-generated content most of the time by plagiarism and AI detectors like Originality.ai

Ashley Stahl

forbes.com

Originality.ai Do give them a shot! 

Sri Krishna

venturebeat.com

For web publishers, Originality.ai will enable you to scan your content seamlessly, see who has checked it previously, and detect if an AI-powered tool was implored.

Industry Trends

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why is it important to check for plagiarism?

Tools for conducting a plagiarism check between two documents online are important as it helps to ensure the originality and authenticity of written work. Plagiarism undermines the value of professional and educational institutions, as well as the integrity of the authors who write articles. By checking for plagiarism, you can ensure the work that you produce is original or properly attributed to the original author. This helps prevent the distribution of copied and misrepresented information.

What is Text Comparison?

Text comparison is the process of taking two or more pieces of text and comparing them to see if there are any similarities, differences and/or plagiarism. The objective of a text comparison is to see if one of the texts has been copied or paraphrased from another text. This text compare tool for plagiarism check between two documents has been built to help you streamline that process by finding the discrepancies with ease.

How do Text Comparison Tools Work?

Text comparison tools work by analyzing and comparing the contents of two or more text documents to find similarities and differences between them. This is typically done by breaking the texts down into smaller units such as sentences or phrases, and then calculating a similarity score based on the number of identical or nearly identical units. The comparison may be based on the exact wording of the text, or it may take into account synonyms and other variations in language. The results of the comparison are usually presented in the form of a report or visual representation, highlighting the similarities and differences between the texts.

String comparison is a fundamental operation in text comparison tools that involves comparing two sequences of characters to determine if they are identical or not. This comparison can be done at the character level or at a higher level, such as the word or sentence level.

The most basic form of string comparison is the equality test, where the two strings are compared character by character and a Boolean result indicating whether they are equal or not is returned. More sophisticated string comparison algorithms use heuristics and statistical models to determine the similarity between two strings, even if they are not exactly the same. These algorithms often use techniques such as edit distance, which measures the minimum number of operations (such as insertions, deletions, and substitutions) required to transform one string into another.

Another common technique for string comparison is n-gram analysis, where the strings are divided into overlapping sequences of characters (n-grams) and the frequency of each n-gram is compared between the two strings. This allows for a more nuanced comparison that takes into account partial similarities, rather than just exact matches.

String comparison is a crucial component of text comparison tools, as it forms the basis for determining the similarities and differences between texts. The results of the string comparison can then be used to generate a report or visual representation of the similarities and differences between the texts.

What is Syntax Highlighting?

Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors and integrated development environments (IDEs) that helps to visually distinguish different elements of a code or markup language. It does this by coloring different elements of the code, such as keywords, variables, functions, and operators, based on a predefined set of rules.

The purpose of syntax highlighting is to make the code easier to read and understand, by drawing attention to the different elements and their structure. For example, keywords may be colored in a different hue to emphasize their importance, while comments or strings may be colored differently to distinguish them from the code itself. This helps to make the code more readable, reducing the cognitive load of the reader and making it easier to identify potential syntax errors.

How Can I Conduct a Plagiarism Check between Two Documents Online?

With our tool it’s easy, just enter or upload some text, click on the button “Compare text” and the tool will automatically display the diff between the two texts.

What Are the Benefits of Using a Text Compare Tool?

Using text comparison tools is much easier, more efficient, and more reliable than proofreading a piece of text by hand. Eliminate the risk of human error by using a tool to detect and display the text difference within seconds.

What Files Can You Inspect with This Text Compare Tool?

We have support for the file extensions .pdf, .docx, .odt, .doc and .txt. You can also enter your text or copy and paste text to compare.

Will My Data Be Shared?

There is never any data saved by the tool, when you hit “Upload” we are just scanning the text and pasting it into our text area so with our text compare tool, no data ever enters our servers.

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Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

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THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

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