DIY SEO is a collection of on-page, technical and off-site improvements that a business owner can do to improve their visibility on search engines. It comes with caveats(technical know-how), consequences(traffic loss) or success(increased organic traffic).
We’ll share easy-to-do SEO DIY tips that move the needle in the SERP(search engine results pages), for small business owners that currently can’t afford monthly retainers.
Don’t be discouraged as we aren’t funnelling you to our services, but we’re sharing genuine improvements that we at Visibility Drip use our selves for our clients. This post will help our rankings too as we deem it first-hand efficient knowledge and you might get content ideas if nothing else.
First thing first: You’re the best SEO Specialist for your business!
And, we’re not joking! In general beyond technical seo, there’s two type of SEO processes:
- The one that doesn’t work: get content written by freelancers (this one doesn’t work anymore since Google Quality Core Updates).
- The one that does work: first-hand, trustworthy, beneficial content. That can only be written & published by pros within their industry they work.
Just think, who can write a personal injury guide or a home improvement guide better than a professional in that profession/trade? Nobody!
Can an offshore freelancer writer write a better guide/copy/helpful resources on a topic, rather than somebody who actually does that for a living with proper credentials?
It also goes without saying, that content is the product itself of the search engines. That’s why content will always trump polished websites, technically more sound competitors (unless there are acute technical issues). And that’s where you, the professional come in.
Do-it-yourself SEO tips for small business owners in Calgary or Canada in general:
1) Identify keywords relevant to your business: how your future clients/readers are searching
Similarly to the rest of the world, Canadians use search engines to retrieve information, find services, entertainment or catch up with the news.
Keywords vary between between the number of words in them, as not everybody searches the same, and will vary in volume as popular topics like ‘best movies for 2025’ will be more searched than your services for sure.
Nonetheless, aligning keywords with your business goals is crucial as you don’t want to attract the wrong type of traffic aka traffic that doesn’t convert into i.e. customers or returning visitors.
Now, there’s some useful free tools and ways to identify keywords relevant to your business, that you can optimize your website around them. We’ll focus on two:
- https://answerthepublic.com
- https://keywordtool.io
- Google autocomplete & People Also Ask (Answer the public summarizes them for you, no need to scrape through Google results)
Let’s see Answer the Public in action, a tool by Neil Patel, the SEO legend (for some), but a great tool nonetheless.
Let’s say you’re an arborist. You visit AnswerthePublic.com and plug in your main service: tree removal Calgary.
As shown in the screenshot above, you get rich insights in how your target audience is searching. Some insights you can leverage to create and position your content is:
- You can create/optimize your homepage around – tree removal calgary.
- In column I, the keyword ‘large tree removal Calgary’, teaches you that you should be writing about ‘large tree removals in calgary’.
- We learn from column S, that you need a separate page to target ‘tree stump removal calgary’.
- In column P, additional keyword variations are seen. ‘Tree removal calgary prices’ and ‘tree removal permit calgary’ are ideal topic ideas for articles you should be writing about in your Blog post sections.
- ‘Rob’s tree removal calgary ab’ is a branded keyword that you shouldn’t be optimizing around it, unless you own Rob’s Tree Removal.
Answer the Public does a great job in mapping out questions that Calgarians are asking about ‘tree removal calgary’.
You’re seeing exclusively how Calgarians are interested in topics such as ‘what is the cheapest time of the year for tree removal’, or ‘can you cut down a tree on your property in Calgary’.
This freely available information is invaluable and helps you make the right decisions when building/refreshing your website.
2) Setup service pages wisely(more is not better):
If you’re designing your website by yourself or using a web design company the very first pages you’ll create are your service pages. The biggest mistake here will be creating multiple pages that answer the same intent. In the SEO world, that’s called keyword cannibalization.
We’ll start off with an example. I recently advised a friend of mine an arborist, the owner of Titan Tree Services Michael Descheneaux, to merge a few unnecessary pages as it was hurting his rankings. Let’s see Titan’s Tree Services main service pages before 20 April 2025:
- https://titantreeservices.ca/: targeting tree removal in Calgary.
- https://titantreeservices.ca/tree-removal-calgary/
- https://titantreeservices.ca/tree-pruning-calgary
- https://titantreeservices.ca/stump-removal-grinding-calgary/
- https://titantreeservices.ca/emergency-tree-removal-calgary/
- https://titantreeservices.ca/firewood-calgary/
- https://titantreeservices.ca/land-and-brush-clearing-calgary/
- The rest of the pages(About Us, Blog, Contact etc)
Now, we advised my friend Michael and his web developer to delete page no.2 & page no3 and permanently redirect those pages to the homepage.. Why? Because the now deleted pages, were answering the same search intent that the homepage has already addressed, which is tree removal/pruning.
This is otherwise known as content pruning and comes with consequences. Knowing which pages to delete is by just using your expertise. If you’re selling roofing and exterior services, you 100% need separate/dedicated service pages to better target both.
If in doubt: always search for your keywords and see what’s ranking (e.g. run a search for ‘tree removal’ and another for ‘tree pruning’). If you see the same set of URLs ranking, then it’s highly likely you don’t need two pages to achieve rankings for both search terms.
It’s called identifying search intent behind a search term.
search engine spending billions to find>crawl>render code>analyze content(it’s a costly process) you’re after clear-cut pages built with laser focused content.
No website should have two service pages for the same topic. You’re showing search engines that HEY: this is my service page on A, this is my page on B and so on.
Doing so, search engines will know to rank e.g. page A on topic A in Calgary, and page B on topic B. Happy search engines = more rankings, and less cost to search engines to crawl and index the internet.
After listening to our advice, and after only a month, Titan Tree Services doubled the amount of keywords it was ranking for. The image below shows keyword rankings on 20th April vs 23d May 2025.
Now head out to your website and see if you have two pages cannibalizing each other by covering the same topic, merge them into one and watch your traffic grow.
3) Write the copy for your service/landing pages by yourself!
Now that you have a URL map on how your core service pages will look like, the next step is writing the content. We won’t delve here too much here as you can be creative, but a generic template that we’ve seen high ranking websites use here in Calgary is:
- Intro Heading e.g. (Best X Repair Service in Calgary)
- Followed up by your most important piece of content: the 1st paragraph. You can add something that you’re proud about e.g. locally owned and operated, awards, free stimates, credentials showing website visitors why your service is worthwhile.
- Add social proof (embed your reviews, notable mentions etc)
- Benefits of the products/service you sell.
- Share information of your suppliers, warranties involved, and client expectations(feature a happy client)
- Embed your local Google Business Profile (if any).
- Share a contact form to collect leads/prospective clients.
Leverage keywords you’ve shortlisted at the beginning of the DIY SEO process, to create formatted content, optimized to rank.
Never-seen before, breakthrough, and first-hand content is still KING! With all the hype around AI or LLMs, as good of a ‘what word comes next’ predictor that it is, it still doesn’t know the in and outs of your trade as you do. So this is your time to shine with first-hand content, unseen data, expert insights and tips(such as this guide).
AI or LLM will learn from you, maybe even spun/summarize your content but you will get citations, mentions, top 3 ranking positions as the search habits show that users will still click and visit the information they’re after.
4) Quick & easy on-page optimizations
These are quick and easy optimizations (also called on-site seo) done to your website that shouldn’t take more than a few hours to do, naturally depending on the size of your website.
- Optimize your page titles. Depending on what platform your website is built off, the know-how to optimize otherwise known as title tags can be found by quickly Googling “edit page title + platform”. Platform being the technology used to build your website. Let’s say your website is built on WordPress, then just browse for “how to edit my page title tags in WordPress” and you’ll get back useful guides on how to do just that.
- Optimize meta description for your pages or posts. If your page talks about ‘stump removal in calgary’ make sure you include the keyword in your meta description. Same for posts. If you’re writing an helpful article on ‘do you need a permit to take down a tree in calgary’, make sure you include this in your meta description.
- Image optimization. You’ll be uploading photos (don’t use stock photos as they won’t help you rank) frequently to your website. Optimize them with descriptive image file names names before uploading e.g. tree-removal-calgary.png, and add the alt tag to each image describing what the photo is showing.
- Internal linking. Link internally between posts and pages. Don’t overdo it as it’s not necessary to link out twice within a page to another internal page. A good example would be, in your newly published post on ‘do you need a permit to take down a tree in calgary’ you can link out to your ‘tree removal services in calgary’ page to signal to search engines the relevancy of the linked page.
Now once all done, and you’ve given your best it’s time to build inbound backlinks to your website.
5) Building backlinks to your website
Backlinks are external domains that link out to your website, most commonly with an anchor text link. Search engine use these as a metric to measure your website popularity.
If a local news publication is linking out to your e.g. tree removal business, search engines see this as a trust signal and give your rankings a boost.
Now that’s you done the hardest part it’s time to show it to the world. Let’s show you quick and free ways you can build upvotes to your website:
- Create social pages for your brand. Each social network enables businesses to add their website link, business hours, logo etc. If your business has a Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, Twitter and Tiktok page, then congradulations! You just built your business 5 referring domains. Not the strongest but we’ve learned in SEO that everything counts.
- Business directories submission. Get your business website listed on Google Business Profile (GBP), Bing Places for Business, Yelp, local business commerce chambers. Just google “top Canada citation sites” and you’ll retrieve hundreds of websites accepting free business listings where you can place your website link on. We would highly recommend listing your website only on Canadian citation sites as they’re more relevant geographically than listing on an American directory.
- Community participation. You’re looking at Reddit, community groups on Facebook. We just quickly ran a search for tree removal on the main Calgary subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/Calgary/) and lots of threads popped up. So be on there, and participate by helping others. Drop a link wherever relevant (do it naturally) if it helps answer the question asked.
- Other platforms to be on. Go ahead and list your business on Homestars, Trustedpros, Better Business Bureau(BBB), Alignable, Law Society of Alberta (if you’re a lawyer), Brownbook, N49, 411 and others.
It might sound hard, but you’re probably doom scrolling every now and then.. Instead you can get listed your website on three business directories, upload your logo, add you website link, add a description and more, in less than 20minutes.
Once search engines find and index these backlinks, or community conversations and your brand is mentioned in adjacently to your services, then watch your website move up the ranks.
6) Local SEO: platforms where your website needs to be on!
Owning business profiles on Google Business Profile, Bing Places for Business and Apple Business Connect is key!
If you open a profile on the aforementioned platforms you can rank more easily in the local map resulting usually in more calls, by solely tweaking a few settings.
Since Google is the where 90% of searches happen, we’ll show you a few optimization tasks you can do to help rank your Google Business Profile higher for keywords your audience is searching.
- Choose the right categories. We’ll take ‘tree removal in calgary’ as service example again. Get the GMB Everywhere extension for Chrome, and head out to Google.com/maps/search. If we run a search for ‘tree removal in calgary’, GMB Everywhere can show what categories the 1st ranking GBProfiles are using already.
In this case, 1st ranking GBProfiles are using ‘Arborist Service’ and ‘Tree Service’. Now replicate the same process for your services and start optimizing your Google Business Profile in less than 5 minutes.
2. Upload high-quality photos frequently. This really helps send visibility, calls, click to your website, or directions to your business. And the rules for this to work is:
Publish before/after photos. If you’re a dentist, after being granted consent from your client, post before and after photo post dental cleanings. Use Canva.com to create beautiful before & after photos on the fly. BE CONSISTENT! Don’t upload all photos at once and be dormant for the next 3 months. It doesn’t work. You have to be consistent. 1-2 photos per week, in a consistent matter will push your GBP high up the local map pack.
3. Optimize your business description. You have 750 characters to convince someone why your business is a fair bet. Write in active voice, share credentials, years of experience, and throw in a keyword or two that you’ve gathered in the 1st step of this guide. Don’t overdo it! Keyword stuffing can shoot back. Search Engines have gone a long way and they’ll be able to understand the entire context with one keyword or synonyms of your main keywords.
4. Keep NAP(Business name, address, phone) current! Goes without saying all information should be current. The GBP division within Google, will sometime (but not all business profiles) will randomly call businesses to check if the business is still around. Google is the best search engine out there, and this act of theirs, explains the care they have for their search results.
Additionally, for your local map pack rankings success, you need to have consistent NAP throughout your website, and the profiles you’ve built in step 5 of this DIY SEO guide for Calgarians or Canadians in general.
If for example you do a re-brand, logo change, change your business phone number or address, take the time to update your website and online profiles. It’ll worth it, as it can cost your GBP rankings.
5. Post updates regularly. Again, you might read online crazy theories on how posting 2-3 a day can move your local rankings. It’s not true. Be considerate and don’t post anything you can think off. Only post discounts, new product/service launches, share new pages or guides you’ve published and similar. Once or twice every month is more than enough.
6. Update your services. Similar to the categories above, optimizing your services is something you should do. In most cases, Google Business Profile will suggest services for your GBProfile.
It aggregates services for you and won’t publish them to your GBProfile until you accept(you’ll see it on your GBP Profile). More often than not, these services chosen by Google are quite accurate, but scan through quickly and remove any service that you don’t offer. When taking the screenshot showing how to find the ‘Edit Services’ option, we actually had a few services recommended by GBP which we acknowledged them as those are services we offer. It can take up to a day (usually a few minutes) to get the new services highlighted to your GBP.
Add the price/price ranges per each service wherever possible.
7. Respond to reviews. We haven’t noticed this to be a ranking factor per se, as reviews are subjective and GBP doesn’t factor those in their ranking calculations or at least, assign meaningful weight to them. This makes sense, as I might like a pizza and rate the pizza shop 5 star, but someone else might not having a day and they’ll leave a 2 star review.
Regardless, respond to all reviews in a compassionate manner (positive or negative) and thank your reviewers for taking the time to share their feedback. It’s a brand-building opportunity and you can reply to a review in literally less than 10 seconds.
8. Embed you local map to your website. As you’re designing and writing copy your business website, make sure your embed your GBProfile on your website. We’ve talked about this before in step 3, as it helps users find directions on your website. In the embed, your business name and reviews are highlighted instilling trust in prospective clients.
9.If you have multiple GBProfiles it would be wise to consider GBP management services in Calgary as these services are less costly than ongoing/monthly A-to-Z SEO services, and if done right, one converted call can offset the retaining monthly costs. You’re looking at about CA$350 per GBP location/city in terms of management in Calgary or Canada in general.
Embedding a GBProfile is easy depending on the platform you’re using. In your GBProfile you will see the ‘Share’ button. Select the ‘Embed a map’ option, copy the HTML code and paste in on your website. There’s a lot of resources online on how to embed a map to your website.
What not to do on your own, especially if your website is already ranking well
If you have a brand new website:
- Don’t use AI content. We’re seeing patterns with AI content and it’s failing bad after a short lived success. Search Engines are good at detecting AI content. If you’re a professional in your trade writing first-hand content once a month will really boost your website rankings.
- Don’t buy links. You’ve might’ve been targeted by Facebook Ads or Tiktok SEO ‘Experts’ promising never-seen-before powerful backlinks that will skyrocket your rankings. These might push your website for e.g. the next 3 months, only to get your website hammered in the next quarter when search engines process those bought backlinks and decide they’re not organically placed.
- Be patient. New websites take a year to achieve significant rankings and 6 months to see some movements here and there to keep you motivated. Once you’re up there, the ROI kicks in and you’ll feel happy about the results.
If you have an established business:
Don’t make re-design a website without professional help. If you have somewhat good rankings, steady organic traffic, making hasty visual changes to your website is a big no-go. Always hire a professional SEOs to make sure the URL structure is preserved among others. So, get help before you re-design!
A good example unfortunately is Epicroofing.ca, a giant roofing & exterior brand in Calgary. They re-designed their website in January 2024 and their rankings tanked by 70%. They haven’t recouped their rankings since then.
Don’t get caught up in Programmatic SEO craze. This goes back to our claim about AI content. If you’re a lawyer website and want to launch 10s of pages targeting service + city with AI generated content, with little to no value don’t do it. Big brands(think international) might get away with it, but not your local website.
With that said, targeting multiple cities for your service is legit and can yield more organic traffic. Make sure you use first-hand content, crafted with care, optimized around that city + service and so on.
DIY vs. professional SEO: When Calgary businesses should hire help
Frankly speaking, for businesses on a budget, following those 6 steps above will not only move the needle for your rankings and traffic, but if you’re persistent enough, you might beat some big names on the SERP(search engine results pages).
For the more persistent business owners who can consistently improve their organic visibility, from what we’ve seen, eventually e.g. after a year, they should be able to outsource their SEO to a local company in Calgary, from the additional realized revenue coming from organic traffic.
The analogy would be a business owner doing their bookkeeping until growth catches up, and they’re able to pay a bookkeeper to do that for them, freeing up time to focus on growing their business.
With the tech sector flourishing in Alberta, SaaS companies that have raised venture capital should strongly consider hiring an SEO company until they build in-house capacities.
Other businesses starting out in real estate, healthcare, home services etc, will face tough competition on the SERP for these markets. The idea for DIY SEO here might not be efficient here.
Working out with an SEO agency on a budget, or considering temporary partnership(e.g. profit sharing), can help your business website get off the ground and as organic traffic increases(so do revenue increaes), you can eventually be able to pay up full monthly retainers and keep up the online growth.
