SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, is an incredibly important asset for your business that you may or may not have tapped into yet. You’d be surprised at how many of our clients have only heard of the word but have never done anything to implement it to their website. When I speak with them in our consulting services and share a competitor analysis of who offers their same services in the area, they immediately realize the benefit of incorporating proper SEO strategies because their competitor has already been doing it! In this digital age, your business cannot afford to remain silent in the digital space.

You may be a small business and think that this isn’t important for you, but I beg to differ. SEO enables you to gain FREE traffic — that’s right, I said FREE.

There are countless searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo daily, and your business is just one search away from being found by a cold lead that could become a customer if you ensure that your web presence is search engine optimized. Now there are various elements involved in SEO but this specific post will only cover 3 tips that can transform your SEO immensely. This is assuming that your website is properly indexed with a sitemap. If you’re using WordPress, you may have a plugin like Rankmath Free (or Pro) or Yoast SEO Free.

If you don’t know whether you are being indexed by search engines, simply go to your favorite search engine and type site:(your domain name here). For Arising Co, I would type site:thearising.co and the search engine will pull up all the pages in our website that are being indexed. You’ll want to be indexed so that you can begin to rank for particular keywords relating to your business on search engines. Without further ado, here are our 3 tips when it comes to SEO!

Stop Using Images with Text to Show Off Your Services

Is your business using images on your website that highlights the services you offer instead of utilizing text and an accompanying image to highlight your services? If you are, then you are making a grave mistake. Recently, our friends in Winter Garden, FL shared with us their old website that needed a makeover. They hired us to look through it and make recommendations, to which I proposed they stop using images to show their services. This is an example of what I mean:

The problem with this is that when search engines crawl your website for any particular keywords that you should be ranking for, they are predominantly searching for keywords in text form, not images. Although image filenames and alt text does matter for SEO, having your entire set of services and any additional information in an image utterly destroys your chances of ranking for a keyword that may be found in your image but is not in text form in your website.

What I would do with my friend’s image is only use the office space image, and then have a page on the website specific to dedicated office space rates with “Dedicated Office Rates” in a heading tag (think H2, H3) followed by the information in a Paragraph tag. I would also write up a brief 100-200 word paragraph highlighting the benefits of the dedicated office as well as including the location of where the office is (in Winter Garden, FL, Orlando, FL, etc.). Doing this will ensure that his page has more than 600 words which include keywords that he may want to rank for in search engines (like dedicated office space, work office for rent, etc.).

If you are doing this for your website, do yourself a service and stop! You will not be found if you do this.

Start Blogging about your Services

A second tip is to actually blog about your services. Now you may not be a writer, but that doesn’t matter nearly as much as getting customers in your door does. You can blog about services that you perform, or even blog about case studies and testimonials that your business has helped others receive.

For example, here in Arising Co we have served many clients in Orlando, Florida and amongst them was a local church that opened up in August of 2021. We got to work on completing their website (https://wearenations.church) and worked with them to establish proper SEO practices to give them an edge even though they’re just starting out. When you’re starting out in something, there are many other establishments that have been present for a long time, which tends to help them on the SEO side of things.

To help this church rank in higher positions for certain keywords, we adopted a blogging strategy, syncing with Google Analytics to understand the viewer’s actions and adapt, created a Google Business Profile and strategy for reviews there as well as backlink strategy, etc. To this date, their Organic Search is at an average of 850 and is continually rising as we continue to work with them, increasing their visibility and allowing them to make a difference in the lives of many people. You can learn more about our services to them by heading to our Work page.

I just used this blog post to highlight a testimonial, however, I’ll be creating a case study post in the near future to go further in-depth on all that has been accomplished for their SEO.

To get started, just begin to write 600-1000 word posts that have to do with your services. In your post, make sure you’re highlighting a particular keyword that your customer may be searching. This may be talking about a Car Repair Service you offer and highlighting that you offer Car repairs in Orlando, FL at an affordable price, etc. There’s more advice that can come with writing a blog post that we can help you with by giving us a call to set up a consultation, but if you are running WordPress, you can install Rankmath Free plugin which is outstanding in guiding you through your post to make sure your post is search engine optimized.

I suggest you start small by posting once a week, or twice a month, and eventually scale as you grow. It’ll take a couple of months before your posts start to give you additional traffic to your website per month, but once they start trickling in, get ready to handle more business!

Research what your Competitors are doing

One of the greatest things you can do is simply search a phrase on your search engine of choice relating to what you think your customer will write to search for your services and see the top websites that appear in the first page. Be mindful not to account for the ones that have the word “Ad” in them as they’re websites that have paid to be on the first page.

Open up all of the top ranking websites and begin to compare what their website shows and what your website presents. Do they feature more of the search phrase you entered in their website and you realize you didn’t? Go ahead and update your website with the phrase throughout (in sensible places). Does their website load faster than yours? SEO includes improving your website speeds as faster loading and mobile optimized websites are metrics that actually affect your ranking. You may consider then optimizing your mobile experience or migrating/upgrading the server your website is hosted on to help your SEO.

There are many things you can adopt, but I recommend that you go at it with consistent growth in mind. You may not have time to incorporate every tip, but if you work at it a little a day, in a month’s time you’ll have made incredible progress toward your SEO goals and you certainly will not be complaining with the influx of online leads that can turn to customers.

These are just 3 tips to help you improve your SEO and overall visibility online. If you don’t have the time to do this yourself then consider hiring us to handle the work for you. We are a digital marketing agency located in Orlando, Florida serving businesses both local and abroad with branding, website, and marketing services. Fill out the contract form below to request a free SEO audit of your website and we’ll let you know how you fare along with recommendations for improvement.

Let us know in the comments section your feedback on the content!