You may have heard of the term SEO, but never really knew the meaning behind it. As a small business owner, you may know that having good SEO means you rank higher on Google and that bad SEO was something you never wanted to hear or see for your company.

Has anyone ever really explained to you what exactly SEO is and what it stands for?  SEO, aka Search Engine Optimization, is made up of many components, as well as there are a ton of different ways to improve SEO for you website pages. Search engines look for features including title tags, keywords, image (or alt) tags, internal link structure, and inbound links… just to name a few. But search engines also look at site structure, design, visitor behavior, and other external, off-site influences to determine how highly ranked your site should be.

This might seem like a lot, and we could just stop the description right here. However, we are here to help you learn how to improve your websites SEO without even being up-to-date on all the search engine algorithms.

Here are three tips on to how to help improve your websites SEO:

1.     Ranking #1 on search engines doesn’t mean ensured success:

Historical, SEO success was measured by whether or not you were ranked number 1 or as close to it as possible on the first page of Google. The question now a days is even if you rank well for a term, does that actually mean you’re going to see results?

The answer to this is shockingly, not always. You may rank extremely well for a term that is not ideal for attracting the right audience to your website. So while you appear higher on search engines and get a ton of traffic, you may notice that you are not getting the Return-On-Investment (ROI) you should be seeing. This kind of traffic does not make any money for your company and ranking high for this particular keyword is essentially unsuccessful.

You also don’t necessarily need to be in the top three slots to be successful. In fact, if you rank well on subsequent pages, you may still have a high click-through rate, even though you have less traffic. That being said, the amount of traffic to your page matters less than how qualified that traffic is. Qualified leads equals Return-On-Investment (ROI) for your company, which is essentially what you are wanting.

2.     Social search is now a vital element:

If you did not know that Social Media has a huge influence on SEO, well now you do. SEO takes into account tweets, re-tweets, Google+ authorship, other social signals, and it also ranks content and people that are connected to you. This means that when you’re thinking about your SEO strategy, you should also be thinking about how your social strategy fits into the puzzle too.

3.    SEO is more focused around content topics:

Before creating a new page or blog post on your website, you probably think about how to incorporate your keywords into your post, right? That’s a great start, but it should never be your only focus. When you create content, your focus should be on what is going to matter to your audience, not how many times you can incorporate a keyword in that content.

In the past few years, search engines have become smarter, and their algorithms seem to update every few months now, instead of once or twice a year. If you create content for your audience, instead of creating it for the keywords you want to rank for, you usually will find you optimize for important keywords anyway. Understanding your target audience and what they find interesting is a key factor to attracting the right visitors to your website through search engines.

Ultimately the goal of search engines is to provide the best experience possible to their end-user, the people searching for answers. If you keep that goal in mind with your SEO strategy, you’ll be able to make better choices for your website, even if you’re not totally up to date on every single nuance of search engine algorithms.

Need help or guidance in how SEO can help your organization online presence?

Let Thrive Creative Group assist you!

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