I absolutely LOVE traffic circles (or roundabouts, as they are known in Europe)! When drivers know how to use them they are the most efficient way to move traffic along. And really, the only rules a driver has to remember are to look left before entering the circle and to enter and stay in the correct lane. If there is no vehicle approaching from the left, a driver can enter the circle without even stopping.
If you own a brick-and-mortar business, you would likely be grateful to have a traffic circle near your location so potential customers can get to your building more easily. There is nothing worse than having a business in a spot where people have to make a left-hand turn across a busy lane (or lanes) of traffic to access it. How many potential customers might you lose to your competitor just because of your bad location? Sure, you may have made a name for yourself. And people might make the extra effort to get to your location. However, it likely took time and quite a bit of marketing to get to that point. For new or relatively new businesses the old mantra continues to hold: Location, location, location.
And so it is with websites. Whether your business is exclusively online or you rely on your website to help direct customers to your physical building, the location of your website in search engine results often has the most impact on driving traffic. So, how do you achieve a high placement (good location) in search results? With search engine optimization (SEO).
Search engine optimization starts with the design of your website, continues with its content, and has an end goal of building domain authority.
Design Your Website with SEO in Mind
For best placement in search results, your website must be fast and responsive. People need to be able to view your website on both large and small screens (and every size in between). If your site does not load quickly most people will click away from it, which will hurt its search engine ranking.
Create Content that will Improve Search Engine Rankings
The content on your website should include both long and short pieces of text. Its format should also vary among text, images, audio, and video. Varying your content will keep your site visitors engaged and will result in more movement around the site and frequent return visits. Written content should also be crafted with SEO in mind.
Build Page Authority
The ultimate goal of SEO optimization is to build page authority, which is a predictor of where a page of your website will place in search engine results. Page authority, as the name suggests, attempts to rank pages by how authoritative they appear to be relative to other website pages with similar content. There are many factors that determine a page’s authority — and those factors are constantly changing — but the one factor that seems to be consistent and dominant is the number and quality of links to a page from pages of other websites. Ideally, links to your pages should come from pages that have a higher page authority than yours currently has.
So…how do you get those links? As an authority in your business field, you could write guest blogs for other websites. Your website is also a great place to create and host webinars. You could become active in the comment sections of popular sites in your industry. You could interview other people in your line of business, or invite them to write guest posts for your blog. And don’t discount social media, especially LinkedIn; compelling content that you post to social media sites could be linked to by other websites in your business sector.
If you would like to see how well a page of your website is optimized for a particular keyword, try out our free SEO audit tool.
