What is the Importance of SEO on Your Website?
As a smart business owner, you know you must have an arsenal of tools to make your business thrive and grow. One of the main tools you should rely on is your website. A well thought out and optimized website can and should be used as an important revenue stream and can become a valuable member of your salesforce.
So how do you get your website to compete with the other 1.8 billion websites for valuable traffic? It's a multipronged answer, but one element is SEO.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, has been an important part of digital marketing, but it is often thought of as trickery or manipulation of algorithms. By breaking SEO down into a few main pieces, you'll realize it looks less like trickery and more like strategy. Knowing a bit more about SEO will prove it does more than ensure your website ranks well and can be found, and how can be instrumental in your success.
The Basic Elements of SEO
Using your website as a revenue stream for your business means the implementation and practice good SEO strategies. Active, consistent SEO prevents you from falling behind your competition who may also practice SEO. So, You should care about the importance of SEO. In theory this sounds amazing, one tool that can get your site to the top of Google's organic search rankings. Yes, SEO can, and does help, however, this sometimes scares a lot of people away because of its volatile and complex nature.
Every successful SEO campaign must contain certain elements to ensure long term success.
On Site Optimization
On-site optimization is the first element that configures the elements of your website - the content and layout. This allows search engines, such as Google, to get a clear understanding of what your site is about (and how authoritative it is) when they crawl your site. By optimizing the elements on your site, your search engine rankings increase, and your website will get more relevant traffic from them as well. Beyond helping the search engines, good layout and content on a site allows users to understand the nature of the website and what value quickly and clearly it is to them.
The goal of on-site optimization is for the search engines to understand what a page on your site is about, identify that page as relevant to search queries with keywords or key phrases and to find your page useful and to rank it well on a search engine results page (SERP). When properly configured, proper on-site optimization can increase search traffic while providing authority to your content via links, citations, and social signals. As you have control over all these factors, ensure you are being strategic in their implementation across all of your pages, so you are using what you have at your disposal in order to best engage with customers looking for information on sites like yours.
Providing Quality Content
Now that you understand the importance of Optimization and you've jumped in and fully optimized your site. You've gone through each page, removed all performance issues, such as broken links, combed through each page, added content and possibly pages, improved the relevance and made sure your site is unique in its own competitive landscape. You may think you're done, aside from a few tweaks here and there - but this isn't the case.
The biggest and most important piece of your on-site strategy is the content. The content you continue to produce for the life of your brand serves a variety of functions and not just as a benefit of SEO. Your content shows off your expertise in your field, helps your site visitors trust you and gives you the space to add calls to action. Content from your website can also be used on your social media platforms or in your email marketing campaigns.
By increasing the number of pages on your site over its lifetime in a regular flow that looks good increases the number of pages that Google indexes and will continue to lead people to your site. As long as the content is useful, properly formatted, original and well-researched the search engines will boost your rankings. As long as your articles are relevant and fun or engaging to read by your human audience they will link and share them to others which ultimately increase, you guessed it, your rankings.
The bottom line with content for search engine optimization, or SEO, is that quality content will always be king. You can have all the pages you want but if they aren't good pages - it won't matter in your rankings.
Building Authority Off-site
Building a presence and relationships on external sites is known as Off-site authority. This means other websites and platforms acknowledge that you are an authority, or expert, in your field. The biggest tool Google uses to evaluate this is with the use of inbound links, the more you have pointing to your site, the better your authority and the higher your ranking. This can backfire however and penalize your site if the links are irrelevant, unnatural or spam, so you need to be very careful how you get your inbound links.
SEO is not just about ranking well with Google; it’s also about ranking well in online directories and industry-specific directories that are important to local businesses. If you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your space, other webmasters will to link back to you because you provide timely and relevant content that they feel would benefit their readers as well.
Just like no one wants to write content they think people won’t read, no one wants to link out or point their domain name at another site unless they think it has value. Building external authority starts by providing value. You need to build relationships with bloggers in your space and talk about their articles, retweet them when you agree with what they are saying, etc. Remember, everyone likes being talked about so when you mention other people in your space it gives them a reason to do nice things for you! When you set up a website, make sure there is a contact page that lists all your social media handles and lets people know how to get in touch with you.
The Consequences of Stopping or Not Starting SEO
Although you may be aware of how important it is to get started with search engine optimization, you might not truly grasp what happens when you stop optimizing. To understand why SEO is so critical to your business, let’s look at what could happen if you didn’t invest in your website. The consequences are not only damaging to your online presence—they can also impact your bottom line. Whether you own an ecommerce store or provide an information-based service, your customers want to find you; and that means they need to know how to search for you. If no one knows that your business exists or that it offers quality products and services, then SEO is one way for you to help them find what they’re looking for (and learn about everything else that makes up your brand).
Some of the consequences of stopping SEO are:
- Lower rankings in search results
- Less organic traffic and fewer visitors
- Less online visibility
- Falling behind competitors in the rankings. Your rankings will fall especially fast if your competition doesn't stop SEO after you do.
You've probably noticed a theme in this post: if you are looking to attract more traffic to your website or increase your online presence, then content is the key element required to achieve this goal. Creating search engine optimized content with high-quality backlinks will put you in a strong position when it comes to ranking in Google and other search engines.
You can prioritize your SEO campaign with On-site Optimization, Quality Content and Off-site Optimization and you should have no trouble ranking well.
Conclusion
You can do what YOU do best which is run your business and consider hiring an expert consultant to help guide you through the process. An SEO expert like ProFusion Web Solutions can also help save time and get results more quickly. Contact us today to see how we can help.