To Thrive and Survive You Need SEO

To thrive and survive in the business world today, you need search engine optimization (SEO). Many small businesses tend to neglect optimizing their websites because of the time required and the expertise needed. It can also be a little challenging to review and understand the analytics provided and know how to take advantage of them.

How Visible is Your Business Online?

Without SEO, your website will likely have minimal visibility online.  When a consumer searches for your product or service, you probably will not appear at the top of the search results.

In today’s online marketing world, SEO is critical to your business' ongoing success.  Taking the time to enact some of the more basic SEO steps can have a dramatic impact on your website traffic and bottom line.

What Is SEO?

SEO is the process of optimizing a website’s pages so it is more easily found when a potential customer completes an online search looking for your product or service. 

This includes identifying the keywords most likely to be used to inquire about your business and then making them highly visible to the search engines. SEO also addresses formatting, URLs, navigation, load speed, on-site blogging and responsive design.

Basic Tips for SEO

Here are 6 tips on how a small business can address their website’s SEO.  There are more, but these are the least technical and easiest to implement.

1. Do some research to identify which keywords to focus on. Pick words that are relevant but also commonly used in online searches.
2. Place keywords where they will make the biggest impact. These areas include the site title, domain name, blog categories, page titles, and page content.
3. Have each individual webpage focus on a keyword. Optimize that page using the items noted above to create a page that clearly emphasizes one key product or service.
4. Link to other pages on your website directly from your home page. Link from general information pages to more detailed content on other pages.
5. Images are often overlooked when optimizing a website. Use keywords that reflect your site topic in the image title, description, and alt attributes. Also, minimize image sizes to improve page load times that can bog down your website and impact search results.
6. Sites with dynamic content often rank higher than those with static content. That’s why blogs and directories (like Wikipedia) do so well on search engines. They are constantly being updated with new content.

Bring More Customers to Your Business

Having a strong online presence allows small businesses to compete with the “big boys” and leverage their limited resources. Improving your website with search engine optimization is an effective way of bringing more customers to your business.