To thrive and survive in the business world today, you need SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Many small businesses tend to neglect optimizing their websites, not because of the cost, but because of the time required and the expertise needed. It can also be a little challenging to review the analytics provided and know exactly what they mean and how to take advantage of them.

How Visible is Your Business Online?

Without SEO, you have minimal visibility online, which means when a consumer searches for your product or service, you do 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 ultimately to your bottom line.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of optimizing a specific webpage and overall website so that it is more easily found when a “potential customer” does an online query looking for your product or service

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

Tips to Optimize Your SEO

Here are 6 tips on how a small business can improve their website’s SEO. There are more, but these are the least technical and most easily implemented.

1. Do some research to identify which keywords to focus on. Pick words that are relevant, but also are the ones most commonly used in online searches.
2. Place keywords where they will make the biggest impact. These areas are in the site title, domain name, description, tagline, keywords, blog categories, page titles, and page content.
3. Have each individual webpage be about one “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 by linking to your most important pages directly from your home page; and by linking from more 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. Leveraging content on social media and business profiles is also important.

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. Optimizing your website by improving your site’s SEO is an effective means of bringing more customers to your business.

If you need help with your SEO efforts, please give us a call at 765-420-8324. We would be happy to meet with you and go over your website.