The technical and digital competence of SMEs is growing more rapidly in recent years and this contributes to increasing competition online, making it more difficult to enter the market.  Nowadays every company needs to learn some kind of small business marketing in order to compete in these competitive markets. For many small and medium-sized companies, ranking, or positioning on search engines, becomes one of the fundamental parameters for successfully positioning online and this means above all using the right SEO tools.

Following these suggestions, even the smallest companies, which may not be able to immediately invest in professional SEO consultancy services, or in the assistance of a digital agency, will be able to start taking the first steps to position themselves on search engines, overcoming the difficulties that the use of the Google tools often poses to newbies.

1. Run the SEO audit of your website

To begin to understand in more detail what is hindering your success and start designing White Hat SEO plan, you can check the health of your website: the audit will show you all the errors and technical problems to be corrected and some important recommendations for improving positioning.

Google already provides all the tools that are necessary to perform this check: with Google Search Console we can verify the correctness of our web pages and single URLs, through the “View as Google” tab. Having a certain technical competence, in this case, remains essential, first of all, to register the website for the service, through a verification system that involves inserting a code into the HTML of our site or uploading a file via FTP.

How to get an immediate check on all the key elements to modify and implement in a simpler way? You can use, as an alternative to Google’s tools, an SEO tool, which through a clear and easy to understand dashboard, or by downloading a report in .pdf format, will allow you to proceed step by step to the correction and improvement of SEO performance.

2. Beat the competition through competitor research

The in-depth analysis of your main competitors  will help to define the strengths and weaknesses, thus finding the winning strategies to increase the competitive advantage : as in any other market analysis, even under the White Hat SEO profile you must first know what are their competitors and how they are moving, collecting useful information to overcome them.

To fully exploit the potential of Google’s tools in competitive analysis, we should field a range of tools ranging from simple browser search (keyword by keyword) to AdWords, to Google Trends and Analytics. This would involve a study and a waste of energy really huge for those who are just starting out with SEO.

Also, in this case, an SEO tool can come to our rescue, which is able to organize the rankings of websites to discover organic and paid strategies, identifying the keywords is essential to find valuable information on traffic, budget invested and a number of clicks.

The study of competitors’ paid ads will make it possible to more effectively construct your list of keywords to be used, and also manage your investment in PPC campaigns.

3. Create your marketing plan for a successful strategy

Although online you can easily find rankings and lists on things to do to build an effective White Hat SEO strategy, only a truly customizable plan and a structured guide will allow you to follow all the steps in terms of SEO to improve the performance of your website.

Putting aside laborious Excel sheets to be compiled internally, the ideal tool allows you to build a list of activities to be carried out, including best practices and useful tips to follow, through a user-friendly interface.

We must also remember that from the content to the images, from internal and external links to metadata, from the desktop to the mobile interface, every element of the company website should be evaluated for an SEO improvement.

Finally, keyword tracking is a fundamental part of doing a good do-it-yourself SEO in a sustainable but successful way. Each update of search engine algorithms generates a change in the ranking of websites: Google rankings, for example, should be constantly monitored to track the performance of the site in search results and to make any changes in the White Hat SEO strategy.

4. Increase your visibility on social media

No White Hat SEO campaign excludes a social media strategy. On the contrary, combining a social management tool with SEO tools means increasing your resources to automatically plan and publish updates on your channels without having to move from the SEO platform and then analyze the performance, using the keywords that have already been included in the White Hat SEO strategy.

Doing do-it-yourself White Hat SEO is not impossible, but to start with you need to have the right tools!