10 Tips You Can Do Yourself to Optimize Website SEO

Ron Smith

Aug 16, 2017 7 min read

Optimizing SEO for outdoor brands is important in growing your outdoor industry brand. Growing your results can lead to valuable new visits to your website. Visitors create the opportunity for you to convert them to customers. If you'd like to see better results but aren't ready to hire a SEO services agency I have some advice. Below are 10 simple SEO tips that you can do on your own to help increase your rankings. They are:

Put more than just a couple of paragraphs of content on each page on your website. Shoot for at least 350 words per page (try for 500) and be sure to write relative material.
Periodically update your website content. Tweaking your page content lets search engines know that your website is not old and stagnant.
Write blogs. Write at least a blog post every month. Let people and search engines know that you’re productive and in the game. We suggest publishing once per week at minimum and try to publish at least 20 articles per month.
Become active on social networks and forums. Ask and answer questions- make a name for yourself!
Write guest articles. There are many places to post articles about your industry, such as: http://ezinearticles.com/, www.goarticles.com, www.ideamarketers.com
Keep up with the changes! Search engines are changing their algorithms and updates regularly. Be on the lookout for Google’s articles outlining their algorithm changes.
Don't bold your keywords. Bolding or italicizing your keyword phrases on each page used to help search engines know which words you want to target. Now, it's worth than worthless, it's detrimental to your goals. Don't do it! Bold and italicize for emphasis with your readers, not for search engines.
Internal linking. Make your website easy for search engines to navigate through by linking to other pages on your website. Search engines love this!
External linking. Make your website accessible by posting links on other websites. The more relevant the website, the better!
Put your business on the map. List your business on Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Bing Maps, and all others. This can help locals find you.

Besides the above 10 actions you can take to improve your SEO on your own, there are a lot of resources you can use to go a bit deeper.

scatterplot of SEO tactics

Source: Moz Ranks

How To Create a Outdoor Company SEO Strategy on Your Own

If you want to move forward on your own, here is a 30-day plan to give you a better sense of how SEO works, how it fits into your strategy, and what tools you can use to measure and report on your efforts.

If you are just interested in learning how to do keyword research? Here's a really good resource to help you do so. It is a free SEO Training Course from Moz on mastering the skill to develop your keyword gameplan.

Want to figure out what your competitors are doing? Conduct a competitor analysis. This is an essential part of defining an SEO strategy. Competitor and keyword analysis go hand in hand, and in many ways, they provide the basis for a solid SEO strategy.

During your SEO competitor analysis, you’ll need to uncover answers to the following:

Who are your main competitors?
What do their traffic levels look like?
What keywords and phrases are they ranking for?
What does their backlink profile look like?
What kind of social media presence have they got?
What does their content strategy look like?

Here are some resources that will help you to get started:

What's This Analytics Stuff

Take the time to set up your analytics package of choice. Google Analytics tends to be the most popular choice of in terms of analytics packages. (If you're a HubSpot customer, you can integrate Google Analytics with your portal.)

Measurement is essential for implementing successful SEO strategies. You’ll need to track data around things like rankings, referrals, and links in order to analyze your SEO strategy and optimize it for success.

For more on how to configure your Google Analytics for SEO, follow this guide.

Any way you look at, there is no doubt that you need to have search engine optimization strategies implemented for your outdoor industry brand to succeed today.

Here are some blogs on SEO you should bookmark as a resource. I encourage you to check them out.

Follow these simple steps and you'll be sure to improve your rankings. If you're looking for a more advanced approach to SEO services take a look at what Revenue River can do.

Ultimate Guide To Ecommerce SEO