How to Use SEO to Make Your Business Website More Successful

If nobody can find your business website, you might as well not have one. That's where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. By mastering some SEO basics, you can help generate more traffic to your website.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It encompasses strategies that aim to make your website show up on search results pages for relevant search terms. When that happens, you get traffic to your website, called organic traffic. (Organic traffic contrasts with paid traffic, which is when you pay for attention through search ads.)

Why you need SEO

The reason SEO matters is because of how search engines work. It goes like this:

• Search engines crawl the web to find new or updated web content.

• Then they add that page to their index, which is like a huge database.

• When people type in what they're looking for, the search engines show the most relevant results.

SEO is important for small businesses because it aims to ensure that your web pages show up for search terms that are relevant to your business. SEO often focuses on Google, which accounts for 62% of US search queries,1 but you can also optimize for other search engines.

If you don't look after SEO, then it's harder for your target customers to find your business when they search. That means less traffic -- and likely fewer leads and sales.

But it's not just about showing up on search engine results pages (SERPs). It matters where you show up. That's because most people only look at the first page of search results, and the top three results get more than half of the clicks.2

On-page vs off-page SEO

SEO tactics are usually divided into two categories: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Off-page SEO encompasses off-site tactics (like having other reputable sites link to yours) to improve your website's search ranking. You can learn more about off-page SEO optimization here.3

The rest of this article focuses on on-page SEO, which is all about optimizing your site pages to help both search engines and your visitors see your web pages as relevant, useful, and authoritative.

How to do your own on-page SEO

When you're just starting your small business, you might have to do your own SEO until you can outsource this work to an agency.

Here are some good ways to start.

1. Do keyword research.

Keyword research is an essential SEO task. Keywords are words and phrases that people use to find your business, like "car dealer" or "health food store." When these phrases are included on your web pages and blog posts, then both search engines and visitors know they are in the right place.

Keyword research will tell you:

• Which keywords your site is already ranking well for.

• Which search terms people are looking for related to your business that aren't in your content.

You can also find out whether people are looking for information or are ready to buy, depending on the search terms they use.

You can get started with keyword research by using free keyword research tools,4 but eventually you may want to upgrade to one of the market leaders like Ahrefs or SEMrush.

2. Include keywords in content.

Once you find keywords that are relevant to your business, it's time to include them in your content. You should include keyword phrases in these locations:

• Page title, which is the first line of a search engine entry

• Meta description, which is the content of a search engine entry

• Title of a blog post or piece of content

• Body of your content a few times

• Image file name Image

• alt text (the text that describes the image for assistive devices)

• URL