Most small business owners have heard of SEO and know this is the secret sauce that can push your content up the list of search engines. But many do not know exactly what it entails or how to put it into practice. Here are some SEO basics:

Research

You have to know not only what your competition is doing but what your customers are searching for. If you are promoting and producing content that is irrelevant to consumers’ needs, all of the coding and keywords in the world cannot help you. You need to know your own brand and the words that your audiences associate with your brand to be most effective. Google Ads Keyword Planner can help.

Organization

The way your structure your site and individual pages will help search engines place priority on your content. Deciding which keywords you want to emphasize can help you think through the pages you have  already created and the ones you need to build in order to meet your business goals. It is tricky to rank for words that are not included in your pages, so think about the keywords and phrases you want placed throughout your site.

Links

Links help show that your content is valuable. By sending audiences not only to relevant pages within your site but also to other sites that have equally valuable information, search crawlers can recognize you’re not producing spam or junk merely for the sake of SEO rankings.

Results

The whole point of SEO is to connect with a wider audience. Monitor your website’s traffic to make sure what you are doing is working. See where traffic is heading and how long they are staying. Hosts like Squarespace have analytics tools built in, or you can use Google Analytics for more in-depth data comparisons.