As a small business owner, you have likely heard the words search engine optimization, or SEO, thrown around quite a bit. You know that it’s important, but do you really understand what SEO is or why it’s so important? If your answer to those two questions was “no,” then you have found the right article. Search engine optimization can be mystifying, but once you understand how it works, you’ll begin to understand why it is so often hyped up.
The Homewood Chamber Of Commerce invites you to read on to demystify this process and to understand how web performance monitoring can help you boost your ranking.
1. Invest in Great Content
According to SEO Buddy, high-quality content is the best way to improve your business site’s ranking in search engine results. Your site should include a blog that regularly publishes content that’s relevant to your customers’ interests. If you’re not sure what those interests may be, you can look at your site’s performance monitoring data to see what keywords commonly direct customers to your site.
2. Prevent Potential Threats
If your site’s security is compromised, search engines will be able to detect this, and they won’t rank your site competitively. Unfortunately, though, cyber attacks are a constant threat to small business sites. You must protect your customers and shield their data from compromise by investing in performance monitoring. You can also protect data by including it in an encrypted PDF file on your site. You can edit a PDF document with a PDF editor tool, and they can be password protected, too.
3. Respond to Key Metrics
An effective website performance monitoring service will offer many insights into key performance metrics. You should be able to see your site’s overall number of unique visitors, for example, as well as details on where they’re located. You should also look for data on the site’s bounce rate — this indicates how frequently a visitor leaves your site after viewing just one page. These insights will help you improve your site and thus achieve a higher SEO ranking.
4. Use the Right Keywords
Perhaps the most valuable insight that performance monitoring can provide is information about users’ searches that lead to your business’s site. Look at the trends in keywords and identify the terms that are most frequently used. You can then revise your site’s content to include these keywords and further boost your ranking.
5. Target Local Visitors
You may also be able to improve your website’s SEO ranking by implementing a geo-targeting strategy. According to Marketing Evolution, this entails including specific areas in your keywords so that local customers can see your site. Targeting local visitors may help you rank higher in local searches, and it’s also likely to result in more sales, too, since local traffic is more likely to initiate a transaction.
6. Develop an SEO Strategy
The most important tenet of SEO success is the implementation of a strategy. You must understand your website’s goals and develop a plan to achieve those goals. If you want more local customers to call your business, for example, you should focus on geo-targeting and writing an engaging call to action. Leverage metrics from your website performance monitoring to ensure your efforts are effective.
Use Performance Monitoring To Boost Your SEO Ranking
A competitive SEO ranking can revolutionize your business, attract more customers, and result in more sales. You can’t achieve SEO success without reliable data, though, and you can’t gather reliable data without website performance monitoring. Invest in monitoring to gain insight into your web traffic and use those insights to improve your site’s ranking.
