By Kyle Courtright
All businesses need an effective online presence. It’s not optional any longer, and high quality content plays a large role in every business website. But when it comes to creating content and optimizing your small business website, it can be tricky to know what visitors are looking for in order to get return visits to your site. So how do you optimize content on your website? Here are 4 ways to make the content on your website more useful for your visitors, and more likely to be found.
Start with Content for Real People
There are people are on your website, not robots. Therefore your content should be written to a real person. Put yourself in their shoes and ask, “Is this content helpful? Is it actionable? Does it inspire?” Aim to communicate and connect with your audience. Tell them your story, and they will build trust with you and be more interested in whatever you have to offer.
Analyze Web Site Speed
Chances are, your site is running much slower that it should. With the rise of technology, everyone is liking your photo, sending you notifications, emails, text messages and more, it’s no doubt that people are constantly distracted online.
Everyone is trying to grab your attention online and having a slow website is an easy way to lose the attention of your visitors. It’s important to take note of web speed and make sure that your site loads as fast as possible. You can check out gtmetrix.com and tools.pingdom.com to measure the speed of your website.
Improve Image Quality
One of the quickest ways you can speed up your website is to make sure that the images are not too large, but still maintain high quality resolution. It’s important to have good quality images online because it helps enhance the visitor, however the drawback is if these images are not optimized correctly, your web page loads much slower. Reach out to your web/graphic designer and ask them to look at your site to see whether or not your images have been optimized. It’s a quick, easy investment that will be worth every penny.
By optimizing your images, your content will be found on Google and will position you higher in search engine rankings. Google smiles at faster loading websites.
Use Local Keywords
Another to way is to optimize your (quality) content around local keywords. For example, if a dental clinic is based in Salt Lake City, that clinic would want to include content about dentistry while including “Salt Lake City.” This doesn’t mean in every paragraph you include “Salt Lake City” and you’ll be showered with traffic. Google is much smarter than this. The key is to write naturally but sprinkle keywords over your copy. Don’t over-SEO your website.
Taking the time to make sure that you have quality optimized content will pay off in the long run. If you are just in the early stages of website development, be sure to take these things into consideration. If your site is up and running, grab a cup of coffee, sit down and go through your site to evaluate the true value and quality of your content.
