Business Website Optimization for Search Engines has become crucial in today’s digital landscape. A website that is optimized for conversions typically has better metrics, such as visitors are spending more time on your website and the bounce rate of your website is lower, which means that Google might rank it higher.
When you have properly optimized your website for search engines, you will be able to attract more visitors to your business website and you will have many more opportunities to convert these visitors into potential customers.
Some essential benefits of optimizing your business website are:
- You can make it useful for a specific audience.
- You can grow the organic traffic to your website.
- You can capitalize on the existing traffic to your website.
- You can meet the expectations and preferences of your visitors.
Let’s first start by understanding what search engines are looking for:
1. Relevancy:
Search engines have been evolving and becoming more sophisticated in how they treat “relevancy” in determining which search results to show. Search engines find web pages that contain the keywords that are used in a query.
Google understands the relevant results by learning from the previous searchers and how it may have helped them meet their situational and informational needs.
Hence it is important to make your website as relevant as possible and include all the necessary keywords to ensure you’re at the top of the list.
2. The Quality of your content:
Content isn’t merely a blog post or Web page that you post to your website. It’ is the information you submit to search engines to be further given to searchers.
So quality content is anything that Google decides is worth sharing. It is the real answer to real people’s questions and queries. It is content that people want to digest because it helps or entertains them, tells them how to do something or where to find something. Don’t just focus on creating SEO-Friendly content, but also focus on creating relevant content for your users.
So as you begin creating content, make sure your website is:
- Useful and informative: If you’re launching a site for a shop or company or a restaurant, etc, you can include the location, hours of operation, contact information, and a blog or social media pages to share upcoming events.
- More relevant and useful than other sites: Ensure that your content provides more valuable content or a different perspective on things rather than the numerous articles available on the web.
- Credible: Show your site’s credibility by using original research, citations, links, reviews, and testimonials. An author biography or testimonials from real customers can help boost your site’s credibility and reputation.
- High-quality: Your site’s content should be unique, relevant, and of high-quality. Your content should be created primarily to give visitors a good user experience, and not to rank well in search engines because through high quality and relevant content your site will automatically gain momentum and will rank well in search engines.
- Engaging: Make your site more engaging by adding images of your products, your team, or yourself. Make sure visitors are not distracted by spelling, stylistic and factual errors. An excessive number of ads can also be distracting and annoying to visitors. Engage visitors by interacting with them through regular relevant updates, comment boxes, or social media.
3. User Experience:
User experience, often abbreviated as UX, is a term that covers a whole range of website features from the ease of use to user engagement and visual appeal. UX captures all of the behavioral and psychological aspects of a user’s interactions with web pages.
User experience has now become a major ranking factor for Google, which is why a good UX has become integral.
4. Site Speed:
The Site Speed determines how quickly users can see and interact with content. If your site speed is slow it can have an impact on the bounce rate of your site.
5. Cross-Device Compatibility:
Cross-device compatibility means that your website works on different platforms or devices. Google recently deployed the mobile-first index, which means they’ll use the mobile and not the desktop version of your site to crawl and index it. They are saying: “that if your site is not mobile-friendly then it won’t rank highly on Google”.
6. Internal Linking:
When a page on your site gets linked from another site, maybe an external link, or backlink, its authority increases.
7. Meta Description and Title Tags:
Adding your keyword to your meta description won’t help in ranking your website but it can help with your organic CTR. Additionally, Google highlights the keyword that the user has searched for if it’s included in the meta description.
8. Properly tagged image:
Search engines view images on your site by reading the Alt Tag and looking at file names hence it is necessary to provide a descriptive name to your images.
9. Permalinks:
The permalink is the full URL you see and use for any given post, page, or other pieces of content on your site. It is a permanent link, hence the name permalink. A permalink could include your domain name (www.socialpill.in) plus what’s called a slug, the piece of the URL that comes after the domain name. This might include a date or a category or anything you please. A simple permalink makes a URL easy to understand and share, hence making it more readable to users.
10. Local SEO:
Local SEO is the practice of optimizing a website to increase traffic, leads, and brand awareness from local search.
Now that we understand what Search Engines are looking out for here are some of the essential tips you can implement to optimize your business website for Search Engines:
1. Analyze Your Website Data
One piece of data by itself might not tell you anything, but when you collect a bunch of data, you will start to notice emerging patterns.
User behavior or experience reports and Google Search Console traffic data will help you paint a clear picture on how people behave once they land on your site, while the Google Search Console data tracks the key metrics, such as the number of sessions, the number of unique sessions, the average bounce rate, etc.
Analyze this data and determine the patterns. Referral sources can also tell you a lot about your audience. Look for pages that get a higher traffic and more conversions than others then you can reverse-engineer that page’s success to replicate it across to your site.
2. Conduct Thorough Keyword Research
Firstly identify a targeted list of keywords and phrases. Then review competitive lists and other relevant industry sources. Use your preliminary list to determine the number of recent search engine queries and how many websites are competing for each keyword.
Free tools like Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest can provide you with a wide list of ideas relevant to your niche and business. If you want to rank your posts immediately in search results, you should try to focus on long-tail keywords with low competition. After finding these keywords, you should try to create relevant content with these keywords.
3. Optimize the On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the optimization of website structure and content, basically anything that is on the page. Since search engines can’t understand content as easily as humans can, On-page optimization is everything you do to help search engines understand that your content is a relevant answer to people’s searches.
Factors like headlines, subheadlines, URL slugs, and meta tags fall into this category. Use your primary or targeted keyword in your headline, preferably as close to the beginning as possible. It should also appear in the slug and at least one subheadline. It should also be included in the body copy. Scatter your primary and related keywords throughout your body copy, subheadlines, and image alt text. Include plenty of context for each so that Google accurately understands what you’re talking about.
4. Speed up the pages
Page speed matters when it comes to both SEO as well as conversions. If you visit a website that takes a while to load, you’ll likely click the “back” button or close the tab and look for something else. Similarly, if you’re filling out a form that refuses to submit because of slow speed, you’ll eventually close the tab and give up. Google’s Page Speed insights gives you a valuable insight into how fast your site loads across all devices and what specific changes you can make to make your site faster.
5. Optimize the Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is about everything that doesn’t happen directly on your website. It is one of the most important and effective things you can do to increase your website rankings. To improve the Off-Page SEO of your business website, you will have to follow some techniques such as guest blogging, influencer marketing, social signals, brand mentions, etc. You will also have to focus on creating backlinks and while creating these backlinks for your business website, you should focus on the high-quality backlinks and not to those of low-quality.
6. Optimize Your Business Website For Mobile
As an increasing amount of web traffic comes from mobile devices, having a site that is not responsive to different screen sizes and shapes will negatively impact the usability, especially for local searches. Google has launched the mobile-first index, which means you might rank better if you focus on mobile-friendliness. Therefore, you should try to use a responsive theme on your business website To check whether your website is responsive or not, you can test your website on Google Page Speed Insights
7. Focus On Brand Awareness
If you want to increase the popularity of your business website, you will have to boost up awareness of your brand. It is possible only if you are creating and putting out interesting and intriguing content for people to read.
If you are sharing interesting and intriguing content on your business website, visitors will tend to share these posts from your website. When more and more people are sharing your web pages, it will prove to be a good sign to the search engines and as a result, search engines will also try to improve the ranking of your website.
8. Get Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are a key factor in helping your website rank better. When high-quality sites link to yours, Google interprets the link as a sign of your site’s credibility. As you build a solid backlink profile, your pages will climb up the ranks.
Conclusion
SEO can prove to be extremely complex, but knowing the basics will give you a running start. So to sum up everything begins by collecting as much data as you can and conducting thorough research. Then focus on writing content that is geared towards your audience by making it relevant and apt to the current day and age.
Create separate campaigns for on-page SEO and off-page SEO. And ensure that your site loads quickly on both desktop and mobile and that you’re attracting high-quality backlinks as much as possible, then figure out how you can optimize your website for conversions so you don’t waste all that good traffic.
Focus on the user experience and the patterns that you detect through user behavior reports and over time, you’ll see traffic and conversions increase based on your hard work.
Isabel D'souza
