It goes without saying that every business today needs a website regardless of the product or service you offer. Your website is your calling card, your virtual storefront, and a huge marketing tool that, when leveraged correctly, can help you attract prospects and clients to your business. But just building a website isn’t enough. You need to get it listed with search engines in order to attract organic search traffic, which is essentially free traffic from unpaid sources and search engines.
You probably already know that the type of digital marketing that concentrates on improving organic traffic is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It increases website trust and tends to have better conversion rates than paid traffic because a potential customer is intentionally looking for what you do. That’s why you made sure to emphasize that you want SEO for your web builder.
So once it’s done it’s done, right? Whoa, not so quick! Good SEO isn’t like a clock that we put up on a shelf and stare at once it’s built. For best results, it needs to be periodically reviewed for performance and tweaked.
Today we’re going to give you some easy SEO updates for your website that will make it easier for your potential prospects and customers to find your business. Before we jump into the tweaks let’s briefly review what SEO is and why it’s important.
What is SEO and Why is it Important?
SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. In the simplest of terms, good SEO optimizes your visibility online.
This means that the more people see your website, the more your online traffic increases, and the better your chances to provide your product or service to a greater number of people. When done well, SEO helps your brand stand apart from others as a trustworthy resource and enriches the user’s experience with your brand and website.
Remember, there are only 10 spots on a Google search page. When you type in a Google search how often do you venture off the first page? Chances are you rarely have to because one of those 10 results on the first Google page holds the information you were looking for.
If a prospective client types in a topic relevant to what your business can provide, don’t you want to be on that first search results page alongside your competitors? If you aren’t, another business just gained a new customer, and you just lost one.
This is the importance of SEO for your business. It gives you the power to be the answer to potential customers’ questions. Besides visibility and increased traffic, it supports you being an authoritative voice in your field. This leads to brand trust, which in the long run leads to a high level of brand loyalty.
So, when asking the question why is SEO good for business, the answer is that it not only attracts new customers but over time it also allows you to strengthen your business’s relationship with those customers because of the trust you have established with them.
Now let’s look at some easy SEO updates for your website that you can do.
Improve Your Page Loading Speed
Page loading time is important for a few reasons. Firstly, if your load speed is too slow, Google will recognize this, and it will harm your ranking. Secondly, a slow-loading website will also impact the way your website visitors engage with your pages. Those negative interactions will hurt your ranking too.
How slow is too slow? Research shows that 40% of visitors will desert a website if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. What’s even more shocking is that 80% of those visitors won’t return to that website. This is terrible for your SEO ranking because it ultimately kills traffic to your site.
But on the flip side, if your page loads fast, people will keep coming back. Google’s algorithm will recognize your website’s popularity and adjust your search ranking accordingly. This makes it extremely important to optimize both your page speed and server response time.
Finally, if your site is running slow, you may want to check your website theme and plugins.
Set Up a Google My Business Profile
It is essential for online businesses with physical locations, or brick-and-mortar businesses with an online presence, to have an optimized Google My Business profile. For example, if you run a jewelry store and a customer close to your location searches for the phrase “necklace store,” your business will come up among the search results if the keywords fit.
You can also add posts, such as sales offers, interact with clients, and ask customers to leave reviews of your business, all of which help push your business up the ranks.
Update Your Website
How often do you update your website? If you haven’t touched it since the day it went live you most likely don’t have a great SEO ranking right now. To drive more traffic to your website and increase its popularity, you need to give visitors a reason to keep coming back. Your content needs to be high quality, pertinent, and recent.
Another factor that impacts your SEO ranking is dwell time. This correlates to how much time visitors spend on your website each time they visit. If your site has fresh, stimulating, or important information, it will keep people on your page longer and improve your dwell time.
Websites that provide highly informative content typically have long dwell times. Having high-quality and relevant content will increase the chances of your website being bookmarked by visitors. Also, when users bookmark your website from a Google Chrome browser, it can help your SEO ranking.
Quality Content is Necessary for SEO
SEO isn’t just about the way things are laid out on a page or your website’s backend architecture. The content on a given page is also an indispensable piece of SEO and should speak directly to what users are searching for.
Search engines prioritize pages with high-quality content over those that don’t provide valuable information. Google in particular looks for content that follows its E-A-T guidelines, which pertain to a page’s Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Google uses these guidelines to determine whether the content is valuable to readers and whether it should rank well.
The goal of search engines is to present content to searchers that are most likely to be helpful and relevant for their query. Keyword research can reveal topics that are of interest to your audience, while also helping you better understand their voice and what’s important to them.
TIP: Using WordPress? Use the free version of Yoast for instant, easy, updates you can make to enhance your SEO.
Use Accurate Keywords
Keywords are words and phrases that are relevant to a prospect’s search query. As an example, someone who wants to buy a reasonably priced dining room set may either type “best dining room furniture deals” or “what is the best dining room set to buy on a budget?” But more than just including keywords in your content, you want to use the right specific keywords.
Keyword research is an essential practice in SEO for business. It is the process by which you research popular search terms people type into search engines. You then include these phrases strategically throughout your website so that your content appears higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). When doing keyword research, ensure that you understand who your target market is, what their needs are, and how they communicate those needs.
Social media forums like Quora that discuss the problems your business is trying to solve are also excellent sources of keywords and phrases. These sites contain question-based, long-tail keywords, which are usually less competitive than traditional keywords with high keyword difficulties. A good example would be ranking for “what is the best used car for the money?” instead of just “used car.”
The best keyword is a term or phrase that is frequently searched by your target audience, is relevant to the topic of your content, and is realistically one your site can rank for. By sprinkling these keywords and phrases throughout your website content and blogs you will rise up the ranks of search engine queries.
Create Longer, Better Content
Content is the essence of any website page. Many people visit your website because your headline made them curious, but it’s the value of your content that persuades them to come back. Exceptional content is relevant, easy to read, engaging, and written using language that is easy to comprehend.
Using headers make your content easier to scan. By dividing your content into well-labeled segments you make it uncomplicated for readers to quickly find the information they need. It is a good idea to revisit your old content and see how you can revamp them, whether it’s a repositioning of keywords, updating ideas, or a more efficient format choice.
Start Link-building
Links are connections between web pages. When a website connects to yours, the link is called a backlink. The more backlinks your website has, the higher it will rank on Google. You can also use internal links to connect pages within your website. Internal links can help you boost the SEO of a particular page if many pages on your site link to it.
Conversely, because there is a lot of spam and untrustworthy information on the internet, Google doesn’t rank all links equally. It is also possible for sites to classify the links they use as reputable, not reputable, or sponsored.
Link building is one of, if not the most, challenging parts of SEO, but it’s undeniably important for organic growth as Google uses links as a huge ranking factor in its algorithm. Hence, all of your data claims should be linked to trustworthy and authoritative sources.
TIP: Want to dive deeper into SEO? Google has an SEO starter guide with tons of info that can help.
Wrapping Up
Remember that SEO is not a one-and-done strategy. You’ll need to plan, implement, test, and tweak every technique to find the best results. Improving your digital presence is an ever-growing task, but these tips on easy SEO updates should help you get the ball rolling. If you have any questions or are looking to build a powerful digital environment for your brand, we’d love to chat! Book a free, no-obligation, no-stress strategy call with us today!
