You may be happy with the current size of your business, but every company experiences customer turnover. To encourage continued success, you need to attract new customers, and one of the best ways to do it is by making yourself visible on Google.

It’s great to have a beautifully designed business website, but search engines want to see more than that to establish your authority when they index it in their search results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of setting up your website so that customers who are looking for your types of products and services online can easily find you organically through search engines such as Google and Bing.

SEO is a crucial part of the marketing function because it is free and can help drive more traffic to your website. Simply put, the higher you show up in search rankings, the more clicks you receive. Research shows that the first organic result on Google receives a 32.5% traffic share, while the websites that are listed on page 1 receive a 91.5% traffic share.

With such figures, just having a website isn’t the ultimate goal. You want to do the work behind the scenes to help it rank highly in search results. Nonetheless, your website is the first step towards leveraging the full power of SEO and the rest of your marketing activity.

As you build your website, keep these basic SEO practices in mind to increase your visibility and drive more traffic:

Use relevant phrases, called keywords, throughout your posts and pages. Don’t use keywords just for the sake of them, though. Make sure your choices are intentional. Overuse may negatively impact your ranking.

• Keep your website’s loading speed as low as possible by optimizing images or enabling browser caching. These tweaks can help your webpage rank higher in search engine results. You can measure your page speed on GTmetrix. Learn more about the importance of webpage loading speed.
• Ensure your design and content work properly on computers, mobile phones and tablets. Do not underestimate your website’s performance on mobile devices. Up to half of web traffic now comes from smartphones.

As you optimize your site for search, make sure you’re keeping your visitors in mind. You’ll want to choose easy navigation systems and build pages that enable fast load times.

A well-optimized website can help your business rank well for a variety of search terms and attract a steady stream of new customers. There are several SEO strategies to optimize your website.