Want to get more traffic to your site in the most cost-effective way? Most business owners strive for this. The more visitors that come to your site, the more opportunities you will have to turn the traffic into revenue.
Implementing SEO is a great way to increase your site’s traffic.
SEO stands for search engine optimization and it involves several strategies. It’s important to help your site rank better on the search engines.
Organic SEO is great for business owners on a budget because most of the strategies are free to implement. Best of all it doesn’t involve spending money on advertisements or paying for clicks.
While organic SEO can be extremely effective when done right, it’s not a quick fix and takes time to start yielding positive results.
How to Improve Your Business Website’s SEO
If you’re looking for simple ways to improve your site’s SEO over time without spending much money at all, here are 5 things you can start doing.
Set Up Google Search Console.
Google’s Search Console tool is great for improving your site’s SEO. It’s free to sign up for and you can connect it to Google Analytics.
With this tool installed, you can check out the back-end of your site regarding SEO and make sure your sitemaps are working correctly for your website.
A sitemap is important because it tells search engines how your site is organized and how many pages are on it.
You can also use Google Search Console to see if you’re site has any broken links that need to be redirected, along with duplicate content that needs to be removed and could be having a negative affect on your site’s SEO.
Just think of this helpful tool as a free diagnostics test to determine any issues with your site that are harming its’ SEO.
Create a Blog Page.
The next thing you want to do if you haven’t already, is to create a blog tab on your website.
Having a blog is so important these days if you run a business because it can help position you as a thought leader. It will also make it easier to improve the traffic on your site via SEO.
When you have a blog that you update regularly, you can optimize each blog post for a specific keyword and add internal links to other content on your site and external links to other credible websites which is good for SEO.
Your blog doesn’t have to be the main focus of your website either. You can update it weekly or even monthly with quality content and outsource the blog posts if you don’t want to write them yourself.
Write Longer, Detailed Blog Posts to Improve Your Business Website’s SEO.
When you start posting on your blog, make sure your content is high-quality and you’re writing long enough posts. People go back and forth about the ideal length of a blog posts. Current research indicates longer blog posts do better in terms of SEO.
Most importantly, readers indicate they like reading longer blog posts, generally around 1,000+ words.
With longer blog posts, you can be more detailed and offer more value while keeping visitors on your site longer. The longer you can get people to stay on your site, the better.
Google Analytics will track how long the average user stays and if you have too many people leaving your site as soon as they click on it, that will result in what’s called a high bounce rate which isn’t good.
When visitors stay on your site for a while, it tells Google that they are finding what they were looking. This will bump your site up in the search engine ranks.
Optimize Pages and Blog Posts For Keywords.
To get more search engine traffic to your website, you want to optimize each page and your blog posts. Use specific and relevant keywords.
You can also use a keyword phrase which is known as a long-tail keyword. Use these if you’re trying to target something more specific than a single word for your business website’s SEO.
You can install an SEO plugin like Yoast if you’re using WordPress. Use a similar SEO tool to optimize pages and posts if you’re using another content management system.
To find the right keyword, you’ll want to analyze your options using Google’s free Keyword Planner tool.
To use the tool, you do need to sign up for Google Adwords but you don’t have to spend any money.
With the Keyword Planner, you type in your keyword idea and Google shows you the actual search results for that keyword, the competition level, similar keyword ideas and more.
Ideally, you want to choose a keyword that is being searched for in high volumes, but has low to moderate competition. If you choose a keyword that is very competitive, it will be harder to rank for it.
For example, if you run a web design company and try to rank your home page for the keyword “affordable web design” it will be hard to rank for this phrase. That phrase has high competition and anywhere from 1 million to 10 million searches per month.
On the other hand, you could try to rank for “affordable web design services” or even, “cheap web design services.” Both of those have low competition in the ranking and but still gets lot’s of searches each month.
Once you choose a keyword, be sure to include it in the content a few times but don’t overdo it. You want to mention the keyword in the title of the page or blog post, and early on in the content, as well as in the URL for the page.
Get Back Links To Your Site
Backlinks which involves other sites linking back to your website is very important and influential in regards to SEO. The more quality backlinks you have, the more Google views your site as authoritative in your niche.
To improve your backlinks, you don’t just want to get random links from any site. You want to get links for quality and from well-ranking sites. This will significantly improve your business website’s SEO.
Some people pay for backlinks from other sites because they’re that important. You can also ask the owner of another site to do a link exchange.
If you have a blog, you can offer to do a quality guest post on someone else’s site as well. If you produce good content, others may link to your site naturally.
Summary
SEO can be a tough nut to crack. These are just a few simple and cost-effective strategies that are proven to work. SEO is a great element to invest your time and effort into but you shouldn’t expect instant results.
Sometimes it takes weeks or even months for organic SEO to start yielding positive results.
The key is to remain consistent in your efforts. Keep putting out great content that Google will deem worthy of ranking well.
