8 SEO Tips Every Business Should Implement
Use these tips to increase traffic to your company’s website
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the critical process of improving the quality and quantity of traffic to your website. Everyone needs SEO, but not everyone does it right. Your SEO practices can make or break your website, and in turn affect your business.
The more search engine optimized your site is, the more searches you'll appear in, and the more organic traffic your website, products, or services will see. Here are our top 8 SEO tips that we think every business should be implementing in order to maximize traffic to their website:
#1: Use SEO Tools for Keyword Research
Keywords are the holy grail of SEO. Using the right keywords helps tell search engines like Google what your website or blog post is about. Choosing targeted keywords makes it easier for search engines—and people—to find your web pages when they search the internet. There are many tools that can help you conduct keyword research:
The keyword tools above will help you pick the right keywords for your business. When choosing keywords, pick words that are relevant to your company’s products or services. The more specific you get with your keywords, the better. Writing a blog post with the title “Sustainably Produced Wines from the Sierra Foothills” will give you better search results than “Sustainably Produced Wines.” Be specific!
#2: Strategically Place Keywords
Once you have your keywords, they need to be placed strategically. The main pages on your website should describe what your company does, what you sell, and how you can provide value to customers. You might place some keywords here and there on a “Services” or “About” page, but in general, keywords really steal the show in blog posts.
The purpose of a blog post is to drive traffic to your site, connect with your audience, and position yourself as an industry expert. Here’s where we recommend placing keywords in blog posts to increase traffic to your blog:
Blog post titles
The first sentence or two of the blog post, where natural
Subheadings, where natural
Throughout the blog post, where natural
#3: Write Alt Descriptions
You should write an “alt description” for every image used in a blog post or on your website. This helps Google identify what the image is and what it’s about. Having image alt text can help rank your site in image-based search engine results pages (SERPs), plus, search engine crawlers can’t understand your images unless they have an alt description.
So, if your company sells wine, every image of wine on your site should have an alt description! For our client Teneral Cellars, here’s an example of an alt description: “Teneral Cellars 2020 Rosé”. This describes what’s in the photo and naturally includes keywords that identify the company and type of wine.
#4: Increase your Site Speed
Did you know that Google takes website load times into consideration for SEO? You might have the best products or services on the market, but you'll be losing the battle for search engine rankings if your site is too slow!
In our fast paced society, no one likes to wait for a slow website to load. According to data from Strange Loop, a one-second delay in page load time can cause a 7 percent loss in conversions.
Do everything you can to increase your site speed. This could include deactivating plugins you don’t use, removing slow-moving ads, deleting unused pages, or compressing images. Your design theme and analytics code may also be contributing to a slow site speed.
The good news is that there are plenty of free tools out there that will test your site speed and make recommendations on how to improve it. We like these:
#5: External Links
It may seem counterproductive to link out to relevant and authoritative content on another site because this drives traffic away from yours, but linking out sends trackable traffic. Linking to high-quality sources in a blog post, for example, shows your readers that you care about their experience. This makes your site a credible, more valuable, and scalable resource for people.
Linking out to a resource that’s a topic of interest for your business helps tell Google what your blog post or website is about. When it comes to links, remember: quality over quantity. If you use a statistic or have information on your site that came from somewhere else, link out to it! And be sure to let others know if you’ve linked out to their website, this is a great way to build connections and gain traffic back!
#6: Internal Links
Internal links redirect people to a different spot on your website. They help Google find, index, and understand all of the content on your website. The higher number of quality links you have to pages on your site, the more important Google will rank it. Higher rankings means more visibility for your website and company.
You want to link to important pages on your website, like a services page or top ranking blog post. First, you’ll need anchor text that describes what the link will direct people to. Let’s use this blog post as an example! It’s about SEO tips, and we’ve already talked about how SEO can help you increase traffic to your blog. You’ll notice that we hyperlinked that sentence; clicking it will take you to a previous blog post we wrote titled “4 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Blog”. The hyperlinked sentence is our keyword-rich anchor text, which fits in perfectly with the topic we’re currently writing about.
Internal links shouldn’t be forced, but used where natural to direct people to some of your other content they may find valuable.
#7: Use Google Analytics
Google Analytics can be used to track, measure, and improve your SEO strategy. It can help you:
See where your website traffic is coming from. E.g. social media, Google searches, or direct, like from a link in an email.
Understand the demographics of your site’s visitors
Find your top-performing content
See how many people convert to paying customers
Track keywords
Find referral sites
+ more
#8: Use Google Search Console
Synching your Google Analytics account with Google Search Console will allow you to see what keywords people search for that bring them to your website. Console will also give you information on search queries, clicks, impressions, and click through rates (CTR).
If you know what keywords people are using to find your website, you can adjust future content to reflect those keywords or build off of them.
SEO is a process. It takes consistency and time to see results. The truth is that many business owners simply don’t have the time to implement the steps needed to see the results they want.
Working with a marketing team is an easy way to take away some of the pressure and anxiety that come with wanting a search engine optimized website. Reach out to us if you need help! Our copywriting team crafts SEO-forward blog posts, and our entire marketing team can optimize your website.