SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is vital when using digital marketing. Every day, there are 100's of new websites coming online to compete for your business. Are they getting ahead of you? How can you boost your ranking and visibility?

SEO is complex and how it works is the key to understanding why it’s so important and how it can help your businesses website. It’s a valuable tool to gain brand awareness, to position yourself as an authoritative/trustworthy presence, and building a positive relationship with prospective clients.

Keywords

Keywords are informative words or phrases used in information retrieval systems (search engines) indicating the content of a product, story or document and how customers find your website. Years ago, strategically placed keywords were the only technique you needed to get your website in one of the top positions. Keywords are still very useful, but in today’s world, they must be researched and carefully chosen and placed correctly in the content to be effective. While doing Keyword research, look for ones that have high search rates and low competition. It’s important to consider how you will use short tail (single words) or long tail keywords (phrases) in your content.

Content

Writing blogs (informative articles about the business) is a vital component of SEO. This is how you reach and engage audiences to increase visibility. For instance, if you own a water damage restoration business, you may want to write articles on what it means, how it is done, what kinds of water damage, etc. The blogs should be interesting, engaging, relevant and educational. When a person is searching for particular information, your blog would come up and you end up building a relationship with a prospective customer.

You can use SEO in many different elements of your webpage content including:

• Blogs
• Photos
• Videos
• Social Media posts
• Infographics
• e-books
• White paper (informative documents)
• Directory listings

Local SEO

In an age where mobile devices are being used more for searching, Local SEO has become very important. While 60% of today’s searches are done with mobile devices, searches are done looking for local content. For example, if you have a sewage cleanup business, you want to find someone local for quicker service.

Visibility

When you rank higher on a search engine result page, the more likely you are to acquire prospects who will then click through to your website. On average, more than a quarter of web users don’t click past the first listing, and this is why it’s important to be ranked at the top.

Web Traffic

The main goal of SEO is to increase traffic to your website. It’s a very simple concept -  You increase visibility, You increase traffic! Statistics show that 33% of the clicks go to the first listing and the first 5 listings get 75%. If you are looking for more visibility, then putting SEO in place can help you rank among the top five positions.

With all of this in mind, do you have proper SEO measures in place? Are you utilizing blog writing to get better search engine ranking? SEO is important, contact your webmaster now if you don’t have SEO services in place.