Beginners Guide to Website SEO Part 2 - How Can You Attract More People to Your Website?
As a small business owner, you may have experienced the excitement of launching a new website only to be met with the letdown of attracting very few website visitors. You put hours of hard work and research into your website, or invest quite a bit of money to have someone do it for you only to hear crickets when you launch.
Why does this happen? Is your website working? Is something broken?
Most likely, Your website is up and running just fine. unfortunately, this is a common experience for many small business owners. Creating a beautifully crafted website is just the beginning. Now you have to do the work to attract visitors and customers to your site.
But how?
The truth is, there are a lot of reasons why your website may not be getting much traffic, and most of them can be summed up with this:
Your website isn’t showing up in relevant places.
Most of your customers wont know the exact URL of your website and future customers may not even know you exist yet. That means most people who will find your website will do so through an external source. More likely than not, that external source will be a search engine like Google.
We already discussed all about what SEO is and why it is important is part 1 of this post. Now let’s dive into some practical ways you can optimize your website and increase your rankings in search engines like Google.
How do I optimize my website for search engines?
Really, we could write a book on the topic, but allow us to give you the cliff notes version.
- Select Your Keywords
Essentially, you need to decide what keywords or phrases are relevant for your business, and then you want to create relevant content based on those.
Keywords are common terms or phrases that people type into search engines to find things. For instance, if someone is trying to find a marriage counselor in Minneapolis, they’d type “marriage counselor Minneapolis” or maybe “marriage counselor Twin Cities”.
The thing with keywords is, you want to hone in on a select few that are the most relevant to what you do. Ranking for any keyword takes time and effort. If you’re trying to target too many of them, you’ll spread your efforts too thin, and you won’t rank for any of them.
- Optimize Your Website For keywords
Once you have your keywords chosen, you’ll need to create individual pages on your website that are optimized for each keyword.
If you’re really serious about optimizing your website, we’d recommend digging into this guide written by one of the leading authorities on SEO.
- Create a Blog for your website
With those in place, you can start blogging and creating articles that link back to these keyword pages.
Blogging is one of the best ways to keep your website full of new, valuable, and relevant content. This will help your rankings.
Can search engines see you?
In order for a website to appear in search engines like Google, it needs to be crawlable and indexable.
Don’t let the terms scare you. It’s actually pretty simple. Search engines have scripts (little programs) that go through the pages of your website and see what’s there. These are called crawlers. The crawlers take the information, figure out what it says, and place it in the appropriate search results.
This is called indexing.
If your website isn’t crawlable, it won’t be indexed, and therefore, it won’t show up in search engines no matter what you do.
How do you know if this is happening to your website? You can try searching for yourself in Google. If the different pages of your website are appearing, then it’s being indexed.
If your website isn’t being crawled, it may be outdated, broken, or not properly setup. Additionally, if your website isn’t responsive (mobile friendly), it’s appearance in search engines can be greatly hindered.
Optimize Your Website With Torrch
In need of a modern, responsive, beautiful, affordable, search-engine-friendly website designed specifically for your small business? Torrch can help with that.
Not only will we create your website, but we can host and maintain it for you. Contact us today!