Whenever creating and publishing a website, you need to have a strategy in place to get your site ranked high in search results. Statistics have shown that, on average, 67% of people don’t click results below the top five listings.
If you’re a small business owner with a website, you know that a site is not effective if people don’t visit it. To get high quality traffic and good conversion rates, you want to have organic search engine traffic, as in, you want people to find your site through a standard search instead of a paid ad. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.
SEO encompasses all the things that people can do to get a website to appear higher in search engine results. There are hundreds of factors that search engines like Google consider when ranking a web page. Because of the complexities involved, businesses usually hire experts who know how to help them get search engine traffic.
How SEO Works
Even if you decide to hire an expert, it’s still important to have a basic understanding of how it works. A large part of SEO deals with three important factors:
- Optimize website content to match the search phrases (keywords) that people use.
- Create a high-quality website with plenty of great content that provides what the user is looking for. Yes, Google and other search engines rate your content.
- Get people to share and link to your website.
Keyword Optimization and Research
Search engines give high priority to relevancy. This is done by comparing the phrases that the user types into the search bar with the content on the websites in the search engine’s index. If there are words in the site’s content that match the search, the site will show up in the results.
Web developers understand that first you must research keyword phrases and then optimize your site’s content by placing these keywords into your copy, images, and more. To correctly optimize your content, you need to place keywords in a manner that is natural so it doesn’t look like it’s there solely to manipulate the search engine, otherwise your site will get penalized for keyword stuffing.
Quality Content
Although Google’s search algorithm is a closely guarded secret, they have gone on record with the famous statement, “Content is king.” Aside from having subject matter that genuinely matches what people are searching for, the search engine evaluates the quality of your site’s content. This is determined by various factors including the number of words on the page, how well-written the content, how long your sentences are and their perceived readability, and how often new content is posted to the website. It can also help to have images and video content because it provides a more engaging user experience and tends to keep visitors on the site longer.
The Ongoing Process
Building up a presence on search engines and keeping yourself on top is a process that continues for the entire life of a website. There are several things that need ongoing attention to keep your site optimized such as:
- Keeping tabs on the activities of your competitors and adjusting your keyword
- Using SEO tools to analyze what sites are linking to yours and why
- Staying up to date on the search trends of your target audience
- Updating and adding new content on a regular basis
- Monitoring your traffic and checking your search engine performance with various keywords
SEO Is Important for Small Businesses
All businesses can gain more clients and sales if they have a presence online. It’s just a given that you want to get free, high-quality traffic from Google and other major search engines. It not only increases your revenue, but it builds a stronger brand image.
Furthermore, investing in a solid, ongoing SEO strategy to increase your presence in organic search results can provide more lasting benefits. That’s because paying for clicks to your site using paid ads may only benefit you for as long as you pour money into those ads, usually at a much higher cost than simply hiring someone to tend to your website’s content and organic search growth.
If you have a business website, it’s a good idea to have an expert inspect and improve your site’s search engine performance. SEO is a broad and intricate topic, so it makes sense to hire an experienced, knowledgeable professional to help realize your website’s full potential.
