3 On-site Optimization Tips to Boost SEO for Businesses

Boost SEO Rankings For Your Business!

Welcome back once again to the Proleadsoft blog! This week, we’re tackling an important question that many businesses face: Just how important is good SEO to your bottom line? For the uninitiated, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Simply put, good SEO is how potential consumers are going to discover your business. Your friends at Proleadsoft are here to show you why it’s critical that you don’t underestimate the importance of SEO for businesses.

Know What Users are Looking For

When planning your SEO, it’s critical to remember why SEO exists in the first place. While it may seem it exists strictly for your brand, website or business to be discovered, the reality is that SEO exists to fulfill the needs of the user conducting the search.

There might be hundreds or even thousands of businesses similar to yours who might sell the same products and services, but it’s the SEO of your site that will help the users find exactly what they are looking for. To rank highly, your site must satisfy the user’s intent by delivering what they are looking for. This means that you must know exactly what your potential customers are looking for, and then deliver that to them with your content. User intent can vary, from purely informational in the beginning stages of their search, to more brand or product specific intent later on. If you want to maximize your ranking, your site should have the right content to make it relevant to the user no matter what stage of the search they’re in.

Leave the Stuffing for Thanksgiving

An easy way to tank your sites ranking is by adding multiple occurrences of keywords or linking unrelated websites in your site’s content, a practice known as link or keyword stuffing. While these may have been a surefire way to get your site ranked in the early days of SEO, the algorithms the biggest search engines use today can easily detect these practices and can actually push your site further down the rankings. The links and keywords that you use must be relevant to your content. If you have a fashion blog for your e-commerce clothing shop, it would not be relevant or helpful for you to link to a popular sports website like ESPN. For your links to have the biggest impact on your rankings, they need to link to other pages that users will find helpful and informative in their search. Likewise, stuffing keywords into your content to the point where it feels unnatural will be detrimental to your rankings. If you repeatedly jam a keyword or phrase multiple times in a page, you’ll be doing much more harm than good. Search engine algorithms always reward thoughtful content with appropriate usage of keywords. The words must fit naturally into the content, or make use of strategic long-tail variations to keep from repeating the same phrases over and over.

Don’t Neglect the Technical Side of SEO

Good SEO isn’t just reserved for the content you create. To ensure your site’s best ranking, you need to take care of the technical aspects of SEO as well.

Technical SEO refers to the ease of which web crawlers and search engine spiders (yup, real terms) can “crawl” and index your website. First and foremost, to achieve a high ranking your site needs to be fast and responsive. Site speed is one of the primary factors in Google’s ranking factors, an attribute commonly measured as TTFB, or time to first byte. This indicates how quickly your site will load for users – and web crawlers. Just like humans, search engine spiders don’t want to waste time waiting for your site to load. A well structured site will load quickly, and keep each of its pages accessible within a few clicks. If these aspects are lacking on your site, both users and bots won’t stick around long for your site to load. We recommend taking advantage of Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool for a great overview of any issues that could be slowing down your site. This could be uncompressed images, too many plug-ins or even a slow web-host. Take care not to neglect the technical issues if you want your page rankings their highest.

The Final Word

Good SEO is critical to any business, but especially small businesses looking to carve their place in the market. Following these tips will have you well on your way to being discovered by more and more clients, with rich content optimized for their discovery. If you’re in need of some helping hands with your SEO, look no further than the Pros at Proleadsoft! We are bonafide experts in SEO and are ready to offer our years of expertise to help you stand out from the crowd. As always, we offer a FREE 30-minute consultation to all new clients, so what are you waiting for? Call the Pros today!