Customized SEO

Customized SEO is one of the best things you could invest in for your business. Why? Search engine optimization gives you the benefit of traffic that is sustainable. Not only are the benefits you receive from SEO long-lasting, but you can ensure the traffic you are targeting is completely relevant. When it comes to Google ads, once you stop paying for your traffic, it's gone, but with internet marketing, you keep that traffic for months and potentially years to come.

What Is Customized SEO?

Customized SEO is exactly what it sounds like - a strategy built custom for a business and its goals. As a general rule, all SEO should be 100% custom. There isn't a way to make a truly effective strategy if you don't customize it. While some companies try to make cookie-cutter strategies, it is nowhere near as effective as a genuinely customized campaign. So, if you plan to invest in a agency, make sure they are an agency that guarantees completely customized campaigns.

If you want the best results, investing in a customized campaign truly is the best way to get more organic traffic and leads flooding your website. Investing in a professional search engine optimization agency would be the best way to do this. However, crafting your custom campaign yourself is possible if you need to save money. All you need to do is educate yourself well enough.

Can I do SEO Optimization Myself?

You can do your optimization. It will not be easy at first and will take significantly longer, as you can already expect 4-12 months for an SEO campaign to give you great results if you were to invest in a professional agency today. So, however much time you spend learning to execute a strategy will add additional time to that 4-12 month period. But, the benefit is that you'll learn how to do it yourself and can do it indefinitely, and you'll not have to pay the $1-5k to an agency each month. 

Is It Hard To Learn SEO?

It isn't hard to learn search engine optimization. It is just very time-consuming. With all of the content out there about search engine optimizations, it's easier than ever to understand. That being said, learning is impossible unless you put the work in yourself. You can read about it all day long, but you'll never truly understand how search engine optimization works unless you get your hands dirty. As you start creating content, you'll start running into issues you must resolve and questions you'll need to answer. These issues and questions you'll have to work through will help solidify your understanding more than anything else.

How Do I Build My Own SEO?

The best way to build your SEO strategy would be to research what SEO is. There are so many valuable resources teaching people how to execute their own campaign. You can easily read books, and blogs, watch YouTube videos, etc. As long as you read quality resources with updated information, you can't go wrong with how and where you learn about on and off page optimization. The most important thing, however, is simply just getting started. All you need is a computer, an internet connection, and access to your website.

Best SEO Tools

I would start with a quality tool. As a professional SEO agency, we invest in several SEO tools to make our lives easier. As a small business owner, we would recommend you start with Semrush. They have very affordable plans. Using a tool like Semrush will ensure that you get the valuable keyword insights you'll need to make sure you can create content that will result in more relevant traffic. You can do this same thing without a tool like Semrush, but it is much more complex and time-consuming. After considering that, the $100 a month for a basic plan with Semrush is more than worth the investment if you plan to do this yourself, as you'll also get insights into what your competitors are doing.

How Do Beginners Do SEO?

When you start, the best way to do SEO is just to start. We recommend that you follow great resources, whether a blog, a YouTube channel, etc. Finding quality resources is one of the best ways to learn the information you need to be effective in your efforts. Once you know enough to start, however, we recommend you set up your blog and practice crafting quality blog content relevant to your industry. How will these blog posts help your SEO? We will write articles about this in more detail in the future, but we will now try to summarize how this process works. 

How to do SEO as a beginner

First and foremost, when creating content, you intend to rank for, make sure that it is relevant to your industry. You don't want to make blog posts about brake repair if you own a bakery. Your content needs to be one cohesive unit to ensure Google will start to see you as an authority in your industry.

So when creating quality blog content, it is crucial when you are starting from scratch to use a tool like Semrush. Semrush lets you see the keyword difficulty of a topic. Keyword difficulty refers to how competitive a term is to rank for - a higher difficulty is impossible to rank for when you first start. Hence, you want a difficulty as low as possible. It would help if you generally started with keywords with a difficulty of 0, and once you rank on the first page for these keywords, you can move up to keywords with a difficulty of 1. As you rank for these keywords, move to a difficulty of 2, etc.

It also needs to have as high "volume" as possible. "Volume" is how many people search for this term each month. So if you find two relevant keywords with difficulties that make sense for where you're at, you would generally go with the keyword with the most volume because this will give you the highest return for your effort.

What Is The First Thing To Do Before SEO?

The first thing you should do before trying to get your SEO taken care of is to ensure that your website complies with Google's webmaster guidelines. Ensuring your website is Google-friendly in all aspects should be your first goal. Any SEO company will do this for you. Still, if you are trying to avoid paying for a search campaign, all you would need to do would be to read through Google's webmaster guidelines and ensure your website follows their recommendations.

Before any search campaign kicks off, the first thing any professional agency will do is ensure your website is friendly—SEO-friendly, Google-friendly, user-friendly and mobile-friendly. If your website fails, you will significantly impact your ability to get in front of your customers. So whether you take care of your search strategy yourself or hire an agency, ensure that your first step is making your website friendly!

Do I need To Hire Someone For SEO?

Whether or not you should hire someone for SEO is something only you can answer. Do you have six months to learn 1-3 hours each day about HTML and SEO? Can you afford to make a mistake while doing your SEO that may cause Google to penalize your website and effectively cause your website to be nonexistent to your customers while you troubleshoot what happened? Troubleshooting issues like this can be complex, as any number of issues can be at fault. 

For example, 1-3 times a year, Google updates its search algorithm, so it's not uncommon for websites to experience significant drops in their visibility. A professional agency will stay updated on what the new Google algorithm is looking for to ensure that their clients bounce back if there are any issues after a Google update.

If you have time to stay on top of these types of things, then it would make sense for you to take on your own campaign. Otherwise, it may make sense to start looking for an agency to deal with it for you.

What Do SEO Companies Charge?

The amount agencies charge generally depends on the area they are working in and their skill levels. Any given business can expect to spend between $1000 - $10,000 a month for a campaign. A smaller business like a bakery or a landscaping company might pay $500 - $1,500, whereas a dental practice or an attorney might pay $5,000 - $10,000+ a month. The price attributed to a campaign depends on many factors. For example, dental SEO in the middle of nowhere will be cheaper than dental SEO in Chicago or NYC. The best way to determine the price you would be looking at would be to call a few different agencies and get an average for what you would be looking at spending.

Many agencies offer a free quote or consultation call where you can describe your goals for your campaign, your timeline, your website, the websites of your competitors, etc. 

Everything mentioned in the sentence above will provide your potential SEO with all the information they need to bid your campaign accurately. However, we here at Spirra Digital feel that the amount you invest into your marketing budget in the form of SEO should depend wholly on you. We work with businesses, and while the lowest campaign we offer is $500, we work with your budget. So whether you can afford a monthly amount of $500, or $815, we do not lock you into a contract, and you can raise or lower your monthly SEO budget based on your goals. If you want to push it hard one month and pay $1,500 but drop it back to $500 in the next few months, we will design and execute a custom strategy based on whatever budget works for your business.

Conclusion

Hopefully, we have demystified the art of customized SEO a little bit for you. To be honest, there isn't much to it. It takes time, effort, and a little adjustment after your content is created. To learn more about search, we have several articles that can help you on your journey to do your own optimizing. We have articles that range from how SEO can help your business, how to go about ranking Nationally, and even all the way to how often you need to invest in search engine optimization.