How to Grow Your Business with SEO

[This article was written by Samantha Higgins.]

It doesn’t matter if you’re a first-time business owner or a seasoned veteran, you know one thing for sure: your success depends on your customers. As a small business owner, you know the reasons why your advertising, website experience and customer service are so important.

Without them, you wouldn’t appeal to buyers and your business will fail.

In an attempt to bring in more customers, no doubt you’ve tried many techniques. You’ve probably put out flyers, posted on social media, offered special sales and sent out email campaigns. But have you tried search engine optimization?

SEO helps a business grow in a number of ways. Below, we’ll detail some of the challenges small business owners face, and how SEO helps solve these issues with specific best-practices.

1. Feature a Well-Constructed Website

Every search engine, like Google, Yahoo! and Bing, use proprietary algorithms and web crawlers to sift through every page published on the web.

Poorly constructed sites or sites that contain unnecessary or inconsistent content aren’t treated well by these crawlers. They have a difficult time determining the value of the website to a potential reader.

Therefore the site is moved near the bottom of available search results.

To resolve this common issue with your site, use an SEO optimizer. An optimizer will crawl your site and help you eliminate nonessential, spammy and fluffy information. It will also help you restructure the site in a way that allows search engine crawlers to find you.

As an example, an SEO optimizer will record the content of your site into readable HTML. This is a coding language that search engine crawlers value. The optimizer will also make sure that every web page is linked to at least one other page on your site. The interconnectivity lets search engines recognize all of your site pages as relevant to search results, not just one or two.

A good optimizer will also create a specific meta description for each page of your site. The brief tags will appear directly below a link on any SERP (Search Engine Results Page). It gives the reader an idea of what the page is about. Effective, concise meta descriptions draw more users to click on the link and come to your site.

With these simple methods, you can increase your SERP rankings and overall online presence. This helps your business grow.

2. Keep Users on Your Site

One of the top ways to improve the SEO of your site is by keeping your visitors on it for longer periods of time. The higher your average visit time, the higher your site will rise in the SERP.

To increase your average visit time, keep your audience interested in your content. First, make sure that everything you post is simple to read.

Keep your sentences and paragraphs short. Make it simple for readers to find additional details that they’re searching for. Link to additional site content within the body of your blog posts and pages.

There are specialists that work for the best SEO company in Philadelphia that focus only on making pages that are easily readable for the audience. This is best accomplished by keeping all sentences clear, concise, simple and to-the-point. This kind of content is easy for readers to scan, then spend additional time on your website choosing your services or products.

Another great way to keep users on your site longer is by increasing its appeal visually. Just be careful not to over-design and overpower your content.

You’ll bring in more customers if your site combines solid content with great aesthetics. It’s important to consider how you want to please your customers before you make the search engines happy. Customers that have a memorable experience on your site will stay on longer and come back.

Search engines will recognize this behavior on their own and reward you in the SERP for it.

3. Boost Search Rankings With Strategic Keyword Use

The first place a person goes to search for products and services is a search engine. They’ll type in specific keywords, then the search engine returns relevant results based on those keywords.

To boost your SERP and grow your business, add useful search keywords to each of your posts and pages. This gets the attention of search engines. The more improve your keyword use, the higher your SERP will rise.

SEO Works for Business Growth

These strategies will help you get started growing your business with SEO. As your results begin to improve, spend more and more time perfecting the practice.

Author Bio:

Samantha Higgins is a professional writer with a passion for research, observation, and innovation. She is nurturing a growing family of twin boys in Portland, Oregon with her husband. She loves kayaking and reading creative non-fiction.