5 SEO Basics Every Business Needs to Understand

What do you know about search engine optimization (SEO)?

Did you know that 68% of online experiences start with a search engine? Or that SEO drives over 1000% more traffic than social media?

This is only scratching the surface of the importance of SEO. It is the primary driver of online marketing traffic and vital to business success.

Given the benefits of SEO, it pays as a business owner to be comfortable with SEO basics. If you’re looking to get a grasp on SEO fundamentals, read on for five major points every business owner should know.

Business, Technology, Internet and network concept. Young business man chooses the virtual screen: SEO basics

1. Keywords

Keywords are the foundation of SEO. Including the right keywords (search terms) in your website content is the best way to help search engines find you.

Make sure that you include keywords that are relevant to what your intended customers are seeking you for. Do research to find out what your target clients are typing into searches and focus on including those terms in your content.

One pitfall to avoid is the trick known as keyword stuffing. Repetitive use of the same keywords on one page intended to trick search engines into bumping pages up will be quickly and harshly penalized by search engines.

2. Quality Content

Content is any narrative text (or images, audio, or video) that you put on your website, be it blog posts, product descriptions, or other information.

Fresh content shows up more readily in searches than more dated content. Unique content is ideal – you want your page to differ in some way from other similar pages, and certainly from other pages on your own site. Duplicitous content is penalized.

Ideally, you want your content to be focused primarily on providing a great user experience and secondarily on SEO.

3. Valuable Backlinks

Backlinks are hyperlinks on other web pages that link back to your site. After keywords, backlinks are one of the most important ways that search engines rank websites.

The key to backlinks is that you want to focus on quality over quantity. Backlinks are most valuable to your overall SEO strategy when they come from high-ranking sites. Link building is crucial to SEO.

4. Local SEO

If you have a storefront or a phone line for your business, make sure to get the address and number listed and consistent on your Google My Business page. The easier it is for customers to find and contact you, the more optimized you will be.

In addition, keep your photos up to date, enable the customer contact feature, and be prepared to respond to reviews.

5. Descriptive URLs

Search engines and your customers will have an easier time finding and navigating your site if your URLs are clear, concise, and descriptive.

If your page is an article on SEO for beginners, for example, having your URL end in basics-of-SEO is more optimized than a string of numbers or article-3. Keep it clean!

Beyond SEO Basics

This is a simple summary of some SEO basics, a few concepts that business owners ought to be aware of. There’s much more out there, though.

If you want to learn more about it or how you can specifically improve your business’ SEO, schedule a free SEO consultation with us today.