Everyone is going online these days, and not just to chat with distant friends. These days when you have that itch to shop for new clothes, find a place to host your next social gathering, or search for a great cafe to eat at, then chances are that you’ll either ask your smartphone for locations near you or you will search online for relevant keywords and click on the first few links to pop up.
We’re all busy people and no one is looking to spend hours in the evening combing through all the restaurant links on the first ten pages of Google and copying them into a spreadsheet called “Places to Eat in the Future.”
Even if you aren’t running a restaurant, if your website doesn’t show up on the first page of Google, there’s a huge probability it will never be noticed by potential customers. Fortunately, there are ways you can improve your website to help it rank higher in the search results over time, which can allow even a brand new company to compete with other local businesses in your area.
It takes time and regular attention on your website in order for SEO to be effective. Quality SEO agencies can offer small business SEO advice and personalized web design services that can help them grow into a strong company. Below are some of the top SEO principles you can use to boost the ranking of your site in search results.
Produce Content Related to Common Search Terms
If your website’s pages are as devoid of interesting content as an expansive desert, then you will only get as much attention as an expansive desert. SEO agencies can help you turn that desert into a flourishing tourist attraction by ensuring that the content you produce is relevant to the search terms people commonly use to seek out businesses like yours. There’s no reason to spend time or money writing about the birds that customers can expect to see outside your window if you are not a company that sells products related to those birds, such as binoculars or hiking gear.
Example: If you’re a Toronto company selling wedding dresses, then a local SEO agency can help you determine how difficult it would be to rank for keywords like “wedding planning,” “wedding venues in Toronto,” or “wedding gowns” which are relevant topics to people who may also be in the market for wedding dresses.
Update Your Website Regularly
Once you create your website, give it a pleasing design, and add useful information to it such as the hours of your in-person store, your work is only just beginning. In order to tell the search engines that your website is relevant content, you need to post regularly to keep it up to date.
SEO agencies can help you generate ideas for blog or webpage content, and many SEO agencies also offer content writing services which allows you to purchase custom, quality writing for your website
Optimize Your Images
If your images are not optimized, it can take a long time for them to load, which can frustrate users and cause them to click away from your site. If users click on your site but quickly click away, it can hurt your ranking in the search results.
The number of users who rapidly leave your site after arriving there is known as the bounce rate. If your site has a high bounce rate, search engines interpret this as your website not being relevant to what the user was searching for and are less likely to suggest your site to the next users who search using the same search terms.
If you compress the file size of your images, they will load more quickly on your page, which reduces the odds of users growing impatient while they wait for elements of your site to load. The difference in loading time may be mere seconds, but in this day and age when people are browsing the web for quick information, those seconds can make the difference between a potential customer viewing your website (and your company) in a favourable versus unfavourable light.
Don’t forget to provide alt text for your images. Not only does this improve the accessibility of your website for those who use screen readers or look to alt text to better understand what they are seeing, but it also helps search engines understand your images and determine if your content is relevant to search terms, too.
Invest in Helpful Backlinks from High-Ranking Websites
If the content on your pages links to quality sources of information, then search engines may deem your website and the website you link to as being relevant to one another, and both sites can benefit from the connection.
All websites have domain authority, which search engines use to determine how reputable your website is. In contrast, if unscrupulous sites link to yours, it can badly hurt your domain authority as your site becomes associated with sketchy behavior.
If a reputable source links directly to your website, this can greatly boost your site’s domain authority. This process is known as backlinking. While you may find a few small blogs out there that will freely link to your content if you ask them to, the truth is that these blogs won’t get you very far, and high-quality backlinks will need to be purchased.
Quality SEO services can help you determine when it is wise to spend your money on a backlink, and who you should obtain it from.
Let Us Help You!
If you run a small Toronto business, then local SEO services and web design agencies in Toronto like nuBranch Media can help you turn your brand-new start-up into a serious competitor in your local area. Sowing the seeds of search engine optimization early on can hugely benefit your company, and it’s never too late to start. Why wait? Check out our services or drop us a note today.
