Onsite SEO

Onsite SEO is essential for all small and mid-size businesses because it is the ultimate driver of unpaid website traffic (organic traffic). While this may seem like a steep hill to climb with long wait times to see even the tiniest bit of traction, it’s worth the effort. Your business is the tortoise in a race with a bunch of hares. Slow and steady always wins the race.

To leverage effective onsite SEO, businesses will often have a foundation of keyword research. This will tell you who is searching for what keywords that may (or may not) be associated with your product or service. Once you understand the types of questions that people are actually asking that your product/service can provide an answer for, you can optimize your web content, image titles, and even plan blog posts (like this one!) around answering those questions. Ultimately this will all help you rank higher within the SERP (search engine results page) {and you can check out my other blog post on digital marketing acronyms HERE}

A higher ranking increases the chances of being discovered by potential customers or clients at no cost, which is crucial for smaller businesses with limited marketing budgets. Working on your onsite SEO also ensures that you’re consistently keeping up with user-friendly best practices, that your website is performing it’s best, and that your content remains relevant. Yes, what people search for and ask about changes over time - keeping up a regular form of onsite SEO effort ensures that you’re adapting to these changes in real time. This ultimately creates an ideal journey for your website visitors and encourages them to stay longer and engage more with your brand.

The longer users stay on your website, explore multiple webpages, and click on buttons, videos, calls-to-action, etc - the more the search engines will see your website as valuable and trustworthy. All of these factors are what influence each search engine ranking URLs and deciding to show them in what order to the user who is doing the searching. In highly-competitive markets, small and mid-sized businesses need to take advantage of these opportunities to stand out and compete with larger companies.

Ultimately, a well-executed onsite SEO strategy leads to long-term benefits, including increased organic (unpaid) traffic, improved overall brand awareness (yes, users see your brand in the search results and internalize it to some extent, even if they don’t click), and ultimately, higher conversion rates; all without incurring the direct costs associated with traditional paid advertising. For businesses aiming to grow sustainably, carving out some time either monthly or weekly to invest in working on onsite SEO will ultimately pay off in spades.

Check out our super easy onsite SEO roadmap to help you get started today