What is SEO and how can using it benefit your business? SEO is an acronym that stands for search engine optimization, which essentially means optimizing your website’s content, functionality, and navigability to make it more seamless to use. This isn’t just for your clients though, although that is one crucial benefit. SEO is also done to appeal to search engines and improve the way they rank your site.
How Can Using SEO Help Your Business?
The major benefit of SEO and doing it correctly is, obviously, views. That’s a vast over-generalization though, because views also bring with some very important derivatives, such as sales, leads, and authoritativeness in your niche. These are all crucial to building and growing your business.
You generate sales and leads by being seen and having quality products and services that people love. On the other hand, you build trust and authoritativeness by providing value consistently. To make sure you’re doing this right, run an audit with online tools such as Segment SEO to start steering your content in the right direction.
Using tools that give you relevant metrics about how your site stacks up against SEO standards is a great starting point for anyone looking to optimize their site’s online presence. While qualitative data is relevant and crucial for your initial observations, breaking those suggestions down into quantitative, hard data can help you go much further.
Start Implementing
SEO is an industry within an industry. Marketing is a broad field, and SEO is undoubtedly one of the largest and deepest sub-categories within it. Because of this, it can be tough to get going with the changes that may need to be made, and you may be asking yourself, “where do I even start?”
Whether you’re a local contractor, architect, run a publishing company, SaaS service, or even an artist of any kind, there’s some simple SEO tactics that are applicable for you and can be a good place to start. Obviously, Saas SEO practices will be different from a local business who only deals with local clients, as their customer base is broader. Nonetheless, the underlying principles that all business SEO practices are built on remain the same.
Faster Page Load Time Improves User Experience
Starting out with the basics, you should know what search engines value when creating and implementing the first stages of your business’s SEO strategy.
Remember, your site’s functionality and loading time are paramount. Major search engines don’t really like sites that take time to load, and latency is something that can give a big ding to your ranking power. Making sure your site is built on a platform that allows for quick load times, and that your home page isn’t overloaded with high quality images and videos are some of the simplest ways to avoid this. On top of this, ensure your website is mobile friendly. Most online searches are done, you guessed it, on smart phones. Browsing a desktop site on a phone will make a prospective customer want to just click off.
Up-To-Date Content Brings In More Traffic
Another pillar in basic SEO should be keeping your content up-to-date. If you wrote a good article 3 years ago, the traffic coming in from that may not result in many conversions if the viewers realize the content is outdated. Upload consistently good content to keep your website’s content library stocked and valuable.
A Great Layout Impacts Brand Perception
A ranking factor that often goes overlooked is the site layout. Your bounce rate is the number of users who enter the site and then proceed to just promptly leave, likely because they didn’t like something about the site, and it’s a crucial aspect of your SEO authority. If a search engine sees “this site’s viewers spend 2 seconds on the home page and then leave” then…web crawlers aren’t going to like that.
This can be remedied by making sure your site is laid out properly. Meaning, for more general searches, direct users to a clean home page that provides a clear menu allowing them to navigate wherever they please to find what they want. For specific searches, create custom landing pages or a pop-up on a page that’s just for that specific topic or product. You don’t want your viewers to feel like they have to hunt and peck to find what they need. Once that’s accomplished, it should be followed up and filled with quality content and information to seal the deal.
Finishing It Out
These are basic SEO principles that every competent site should be implementing. There are advanced SEO tactics that can, and likely should, be undertaken in most cases if you really want to get the most juice out of your squeeze in regards to what your business’s website has to offer. Start with these basic changes that can be done yourself, and move into that next phase when you’re ready to.