SEO Made Simple

A good website plays two games: The first game is for the customers—real people who click on your website and are convinced to buy based on the writing, images, and reviews. The second game is for the robots—Google’s web crawlers that algorithmically determine where your website will place in the search rankings.

You may think this is dumb. We may be inclined to agree with you. But Google indexes hundreds of billions of pages, so they need an automated approach to ranking websites on relevancy. Entire careers are based on search engine optimization (SEO), and they are fairly lucrative.

It may seem impossible to land your website on the first page of Google, especially if it means competing with big companies that hire teams of SEO specialists.

But it isn’t.

It takes time and effort, but small businesses rank at the top of local searches all the time.

If you don’t want to worry about any of this, sign up today and we will build you a website that is optimized for SEO. But if you want improve your ranking on your own, here are the SEO principles that matter most:

Backlinks

The most important ranking factor—do other websites trust you enough to link to you?

Backlinks from your social media pages are good. Backlinks from related websites (perhaps in a review or from a guest blog post) are even better. Make sure to build relationships online when you can and encourage people to link to your website.

Don’t be afraid to link out to other websites, either. Reciprocity works.

Keywords

Keywords are what users search for in Google. If you own a plumbing business, you want to show up whenever someone searches “plumber cedar rapids” or “clogged drain fix”.

You can come up with keywords on your own, ones that you know your customers are searching for, and include them in your website.

Professionals will actually research keywords, including how competitive they are to rank for, and use them appropriately throughout your website.

Page Speed

A fast website doesn’t just keep customers from leaving (50% of mobile users will leave your site if it doesn’t load fast enough); speed has been one of Google’s ranking factors since 2018. You want your website to score 95+ in all of Google’s core vitals, or ideally get four perfect 100s.

This is most often achieved by compressing images and serving the correct image size for your user (i.e., don’t give a high-resolution image to a mobile user when a smaller version would do the trick).

Time on Site

Many small businesses have all of their information on a single web page. If a visitor reads your page and leaves, Google will treat that as a bounce and penalize you! You want to keep users on your website, and ideally, interacting with it. You can do this by creating separate pages for key services and interlinking them. You can even get crafty by making links to external websites open in a new tab, so customers stay on your page even after clicking.

Content Freshness

Google needs to see that your website is being properly maintained. Having a blog is a great way to produce fresh content. However, even going through old articles and providing little updates goes a long way. Make sure that someone is going through your website once per year to keep it fresh.

Topical Authority

For both SEO and marketing, you want your website to be authoritative. That means that customers and interested parties come to you to learn about your profession.

To do this, break down your business into multiple sub-services and write informational articles about each one. Those are called “content silos” in SEO-speak. Then you want to interlink the articles to connect them. If you don’t have a blog, this can be done with dedicated services subpages.

Conclusion

While there are over 200 known ranking factors, these are the ones that matter most. It can be a hassle, but getting these right will allow you to focus on the game that really matters—convincing your website visitors to become your customers.