How to Use Basic Site Optimization to Gain Traffic and Keep People On Your Site

SEO. There it is, that daunting acronym. If you’ve done any research whatsoever about having a successful website, you know that SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the foundation of an effective site. It means that your website does a good job of incorporating a bunch of elements, like specific keywords, location and load time, making it easy for people to find your site when they’re searching for local services like yours.

For the sake of keeping this at a basic level, we won’t delve too deep into SEO and how it works . But there are a few parts of it that you can easily incorporate into your website that can help immensely.

One of the first things people notice about the optimization of your site is loading time. The longer it takes your web pages and images to load, the more people are driven away. No one wants to wait 30 seconds for every page to load, especially on a website where people are likely to be scrolling through pictures.

According to data collected by Googlein 2016, 53 percent of website visits on a mobile device are abandoned if the site takes more than three seconds to load . That’s pretty significant when you think that over half your leads are dropping if your mobile site takes more than 3 seconds to load. That, in turn, affects your overall sales.

Additionally, a 2012 study by customer data platform Tagman (now Ensighten), found that a one-second delay in page loading time can result in a 7 percent loss in online sales . So, the longer it takes for your website to load, the more sales you are losing. For smaller businesses, that’s a pretty significant loss.

We live in an age where information is available at our fingertips, and if people can’t access something immediately through you, they will most likely move on to a faster site, leaving you in the dust. In a way, this relates to having an updated site, too, as people view sites with slow load times as outdated and obsolete—neither of which you want to be.

There are a number of technical ways to speed up your site’s loading time, but the easiest way is to modify your design. The Daily Egg states in an article , “the quickest way to improve site speed is to simplify your design.” There are a number of elements that play into this, like reducing the number of components on each page or combining multiple style sheets.

Having fewer high-quality images on your site also helps with website speed, although this contradicts the goal of showing off your work on your website. Luckily, there is a way to increase website speed without getting rid of all your images. However, this is pretty technical, which is why we recommend hiring a pro for stuff like this. It’s important to get it right.

Another way to make sure your site is SEO-friendly is making your location well-known. Visitors should know where your showroom is located, as well as what areas you serve. This is an important difference to note, because you want people to know that the town your showroom is in is not the only location you serve. Mentioning surrounding cities or suburbs that you also want to target is a good way to broaden your location and where you show up in “local” searches.

Including this information in different ways—throughout the content, on your “Contact Us” page and in the NAP (name, address, phone number) at the bottom of each page—is easy. If you have a professional working on your site, they can add various schema codes and Google Maps modules to further optimize your location. But mentioning a handful of locations you want to target is a good place to start.

The Bottom Line: When you’re simply looking at SEO from a basic level, the speed and location optimization of your website are two key factors that should be emphasized in helping your website rank locally. There are plenty more SEO elements that are important to utilize if you want your website to show up for people looking for services in your location, but those are best left to professionals.

This article is just one part of a larger series, “Is Your Website Helping or Hurting Your Business?” To read the article in its entirety and learn more about leveraging your website, click here .