For small businesses around the Collinsville, IL area, having an online presence is crucial for generating new leads. One thing that many businesses fail to realize, however, is the importance of having good SEO to rank high on online searches. If your business does not show up when people look up the services you provide, you are going to have a harder time trying to bring in more customers. Thankfully, there are many ways to improve your SEO. Making sure that your website is fully optimized is one of the biggest ways to do this. In this blog post, we would like to explain how to design your website to maximize your SEO potential online.
Using Keywords
The first and one of the most important steps in optimizing your website’s SEO is understanding keywords. Keywords refer to words used in your website’s content which will help search engines push it towards demographics of people looking for your services. There are many different tools and resources you can use to determine what are the most successful keywords to incorporate into your content. It is also very important to make sure that you avoid keyword stuffing as much as possible in the content of your website as many search engines like Google penalize what it views as spam content, and it will affect your ranking overall. Also be sure to use relevant keywords and keywords that relate to your type of business or the services you provide. You should also focus on targeting a specific location in the content. This will help improve your rankings in your service areas.
Regular Content
Content is the biggest part of a website’s SEO and posting new content regularly will help boost your SEO potential far beyond other businesses. One way to do this is by writing & posting blogs on your website on a regular basis. Blogs can help drive keywords and be helpful to promote the services your business provides. Other forms of regular content can include videos, podcasts, pictures, & more.
Utilizing Alt Tags
Alt tags are important to have on all the images on your website for search engines to get an idea of what your content is about. When you write the alt tag for images on your website, make sure they are not too long and that they are relevant and accurate to the service in the image.
Optimizing Your Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
An often overlooked aspect of a website are the title tags & meta descriptions. Just like the content, these are keyword based and important for communicating to not only potential leads but the search engines to boost your rankings. Also, just like content, it is important not to cram in too many keywords and to include a target location.
Keeping Your Website Organized
If your website is too cluttered, not only will it drive away potential leads, it can also negatively affect your SEO. Make sure that your website is easy to navigate and that each page and photo serves a purpose. One common mistake many Collinsville, IL business owners make in their website design is to not account for other displays. Not only do you need to make sure your website looks organized for desktop displays but also mobile & tablet displays. Search engines like Google look at mobile views in their ranking algorithm.
Constantly Good Website Speed
With addition to having good navigation on your website, ensuring that everything loads quickly is very important. If your website takes too long to load, it can drive away potential leads who may have done business with you had they been able to access the information about your services quick enough. There are many tools that you can use to test your website’s speed. If you find that your website is taking too long to load, there are a variety of different plugins and methods you can use to improve your website speed. We recommend using smaller image file sizes such as WebP.
There are many other factors that you need to consider in improving your business’s SEO online than just better web design. Thankfully you do not have to do it all alone. If you own a business around the Collinsville, IL area and are looking for a company who can help improve your rankings online, call Hometown Marketing Group. Our experienced team helps many other small local businesses improve their SEO ranking online to help them bring in more business. Find out how we can improve your business’s SEO today.
