Understand How Better SEO Will Help Your Business

There’s something called the “so what?” factor in research. Every doctoral student has to answer that question when we decide on our dissertation topic. The same rule applies in web design. I want you to understand how better SEO will help your business.

When someone comes to your website, you have 3-5 seconds to catch their attention.

Three to five seconds. If you are lucky, a visitor may stay 7 seconds.

“What?!?!” you cry. All of those hours you put into building the best-looking, most fabulous site, EVER.

Yes, three to five seconds. Not minutes. Not hours. Seconds.

So, what’s a DIY web designer to do? Or, a newbie web designer? Or even, an experienced web designer?

It’s simple. Pay attention to all the nuances.

• Minimize page load time. That means you have to eliminate any broken links, redirects, and optimize your images for faster loading.
   
• Pay attention to navigation and the F-Pattern. Users look at the page in a certain direction, make sure your most important stuff is to the left.
   
• Use focus keywords for your pages, and write clear and concise content. (Yes, I said that; I am an academic, and I said that.)
   
• Describe your page well, accurately, and concisely in the meta description, so that only people who really want what you are offering come to your page. If you have “LOL Kittens”, make sure they are “LOL Kittens”. Not, “LOL Mittens”.
   
• Put your address and contact information in the footer and on a contact page, so that search engines know when to show you in local-to-you results.
   

I could continue to list the things you can do to catch someone’s attention in that crucial few seconds and keep them, but you get the gist of it. (And if you would like to learn more, here are Six Tips for a Solid Website.)

The point is, almost anyone can build a pretty good website with tools like SquareSpace. Yet, if you don’t have well-described content and an easily navigable site that loads quickly and easily, you will lose readers and customers.

Better SEO

The point is, SEO makes your site better, faster, and stronger for your readers and for search engine crawlers. They will stay on it longer, share it more often, and you will see your organic rankings soar.

If You Want to Improve Your Search Engine Results Rankings

If you want to go the DIY route, there are many excellent starter guides online. I have listed a few here.

1. Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide 
2. Moz The Beginner’s Guide to SEO 
3. SquareSpace Increasing your site’s visibility to search engines 
4. Yoast WordPress SEO Tutorial The Definitive Guide

If you would rather leave the techie work to someone else, we would love to optimize your site for you. Honestly, we love this work.

Whichever option you choose, Good Luck!

If you would like to work with me to get found online and increase sales, please see my SEO services page.