
You've probably heard a lot about SEO, done a bit of research and maybe even tried your hand at optimizing your website's meta tags and keywords. Still not seeing enough improvement in your search rankings and visitor analytics? Best practices for SEO are constantly changing. It's important to stay on top of the most recent recommendations and keep track of what's working for you. SEO can be critical to driving new business, staying ahead of your competition, TOMA, and is also linked to your customers having an exceptional user experience on your site.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a website, using a set of rules which ensure that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine like Google or Bing. There are several components to SEO, including Page Titles, Keywords, Meta Tags, Content and Backlinks. In this post, we'll outline why SEO is so important and highlight some helpful tips to help you enhance your SEO strategy and drive more traffic to your site.

Search Results
Organic search is the leading source of website traffic, which means getting your site to appear in search results on Google should be your #1 priority. Most people never scroll past the first page of search results, so getting your page off the second or third page and onto the first page is critical. Congrats! Keywords are now your best friend. Typically, customers use generic keywords instead of searching for your specific company or service. Keep in mind that they probably aren't subject matter experts like you are - think in layman's terms and use a combination of generic and more specific terms for best results.
Check with your website host to find out how to add keywords to your website. Some sites, like Wix.com, make it easy by having an SEO tab for each page, where you can manually add keywords, including creating your page titles based on popular search terms.
Insider Tip: not sure what your keywords should be? Check out Google Keyword Planner. Start with a couple keywords that describe your business and see what other keywords Google recommends.
Improve Business
Are you struggling with attracting visitors, converting them into prospects, and even further into customers? Your SEO strategy could be contributing to this problem. Let's say you have a direct competitor, and they offer all the same goods services as you at a comparable quality. Your SEO strategy could be what puts you ahead of them in search rankings, leading to more clicks for you (which eventually leads to more business). This is just one reason why a good SEO strategy is so critical to having a successful business.
Insider Tip: Backlinks are a great way to improve your rank in search results. Backlinking is the process of adding hyperlinks to other sites to your content (or a blog post/link on your own website). Try reaching out to other companies related to your industry and see if they will backlink to your site in exchange for backlinking to theirs.
UX Design
First and foremost, your site needs to provide a great user experience (UX). Chances are, if you're putting time into your SEO strategy you're also invested in creating an enjoyable UX for your visitors. The easier it is for a visitor to find the information they need from your site, the more likely they are to become customers. Not only that, but Google actually takes a site's UX into account when ranking sites in search results. How easy is it to get around your site? Do you have quality content that makes visitors want to stay and engage, aka click? Is your site secure, fast and mobile-friendly? These are all questions you need to ask yourself - and your customers - that will help you get ahead of competitors in search results.

The Bottom Line
Putting resources into an effective SEO strategy is necessary to drive traffic to your website. The higher you rank on search engines, the more visitors you will get. The better your UX design, the more time users will spend on your website, which also improves your ranking. More clicks = more page visits = more conversions = more business. And since SEO is relatively cheap to invest in, it's a no-brainer to spend time on it.
We hope this is a helpful guide to get you started on your SEO strategy. If you need help, don't hesitate to contact us for more information!
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