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8 Business SEO Must-Haves

Search engine optimization (SEO) improves your business’s organic search engine ranking, and with that comes more traffic (and customers) to your website. So, what’s the secret? What does a business need to improve their SEO?

In an earlier article, we discussed how to use your blog as an powerful search engine optimization tool. In this article, we reveal 8 SEO must-haves that will supercharge your website's SEO performance:

The Right Keywords. Keyword research is the most important thing to do because keywords drive organic search. Finding the right keywords involves a combination of knowing your product, your audience, and the market. It can take some effort to keep your keywords relevant and up-to-date, but well-chosen keywords guide SEO optimization and increase customer intake.

The Right Content. The content on your website has to do several things. Capture reader attention, keep that attention, and encourage the desired behavior, be it search for more information or make a purchase. Not only that, but content has to use the right words, the right keywords, to be included in search results.

Smart Metadata Use. Keywords are for humans; metadata are for the bits of programming that drive search engines. Your website has to look good to the SEO algorithm that ranks pages, which means taking your keywords and similar terms and inserting them in the code that describes your website.

Submitted Sitemap. Sitemaps speed up how quickly search engines can crawl and index a website, showing bots where to go and what metadata to read. They need to be submitted to each search engine individually. For the sake of your business, Google and Bing are the minimum two search engines a website’s sitemap should be submitted to.

Fast Website Loading. In today’s world of instant gratification, a slow loading website can turn away customers and harm an SEO ranking. Speeding up a website is the result of several tactics – decreasing image size, condensing code, server settings – that should all be considered.

Mobile-friendly design. By the end of 2019, mobile devices generated 52.6% of all web traffic. This means you have to make sure your small business website works on the small screen to both boost your SEO rank and encourage customers to shop.

Unique content. Limit the amount of stock text on your website to avoid SEO penalties. For situations where you have to use it, it’s best to keep the text snippet small.

Backlinks. Connect the pages of your website to one another and connect your website to others. Like keywords, it’s important to choose backlinks carefully. The right ones will help you increase your SEO and the wrong ones can hurt your score. The successful implantation of small business SEO tactics can raise your SEO rank. That means your website can capture more organic traffic, increasing your leads. Just one of these SEO must-haves can improve your ranking, but using all eight can put you ahead of the competition.

Avatar New York Web Design is an award-winning, web design and development company specializing in website design, custom development, seo, and managed web hosting.