Precision-Guide Your Business with SEO

Want to Boost Your Business? Befriend the Search Engine.

A well-structured website can make your business outshine its competition, but if your customers can’t find it, all your messaging will amount to nothing. To give your business the boost it needs and get the results you (and your customers) are looking for, you’ll need to engage in what’s known as search engine optimization, or SEO.

Far from the buzzword of the moment, SEO is the key to an effective online presence, and can make a major difference for businesses whose name searches get lost in irrelevant results. It also won’t require a dedicated IT team, just some smart practices by you and your business can make SEO work for you, no matter your size. Here are three highly effective ways businesses can make the most of SEO.

• Up your site’s speed

Faster sites outperform slower ones on search engines, but that’s just the beginning of why you should step on the gas. A study showed that 40% of users leave a website if it takes too long to load. A delay of as little as one second can lead to 7% fewer conversions. When it comes to SEO and basic customer satisfaction, a speedier website means more attention for you and your product.

Making your website faster can be as simple as removing large, data-heavy images from your site or cutting down on slow-loading videos. When you’re ready to go further, there are many DIY ways to improve your website speed. Otherwise, hiring a capable developer to do the behind-the-scenes work can free you up and get your page speed in line with SEO best practices.

• Choose the right keywords

Google wants to know how people discover you. What words would they type into the search engine? Implementing those words throughout your website will make you rank higher on the search engine algorithm and therefore get more website hits.

To determine the best keywords for your business, first make a list of your services, products, and other relevant topics. Then, enter them into one of many free keyword tools. Choose the most appropriate words and phrases, but avoid the most popular ones across the board. You’re looking for the ones that fully describe your business without being too obscure.

Once you determine your best SEO keywords, make free use of them in your website’s copy, blog content, links, meta descriptions, photo captions, and more. When users search for these terms, they’ll be likelier to find you and your business, ready to help.

• Optimize, optimize, optimize

At the heart of SEO is the O: Optimization. Every SEO technique boils down to making the most of what you’ve got to ensure it’s relevant to Google users, not only grabbing their attention but retaining it. Ensuring audience engagement isn’t always an exact science, but creating a website that users will be happy to visit over and over again is an invaluable tool when it comes to optimizing.

So, how do you accomplish that? By blogging! A regularly updated blog on your business’ site can accomplish several goals. For one, it can cement your reputation as someone who knows what you’re talking about when it comes to your work. Two, it gives you regular pieces of shareable content that you can use to spread the word on social media. Most importantly for SEO purposes, regularly updated content keeps your page high in Google results, as their algorithm is designed to ignore sites that sit stagnant and promote ones that provide regular and substantial updates.