In today’s world, the internet is increasingly becoming a hub for business, marketing, and promotion. However, just simply being on the internet and having a website is not enough. You need to make your website noticeable enough to attract customers and bring more attention to your franchise.
Why You Should Build an SEO-Friendly Website
In learning how to make an SEO-friendly website, you need to know what SEO is. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of increasing the amount of traffic a website receives. Effective SEO strategies focus on increasing the quality or relevance of that traffic by increasing the visibility of a website in search engines. Most internet users find websites via search engines. SEO helps optimize your website to rank higher in a search engine’s results for a given search term or phrase. For a franchise, this is extremely important.
A website that is properly optimized with sound SEO techniques offers your franchise many benefits that can help cultivate your business, such as:
- An increase in organic traffic: SEO-friendly websites drive more traffic from search engines that could result in more people knowing about your business.
- More user-friendly website: A user-friendly website enhances the user experience and will make it more likely for the user to stay longer, interact with the website more, or visit the website more often, increasing the odds of completing a transaction.
- Increased brand visibility and credibility: Websites or businesses are more likely to be trusted by users if they were found in the first pages of search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. This, in turn, leads to more brand awareness and credibility.
- Cost-effectiveness: An optimized website is cost-effective as it will drive targeted traffic at all times of the day. It is good for the long term and is different from other paid online advertising like paid social, pay-per-click (PPC), and website ads.
- Demographic data: A properly optimized website helps you understand what your important customers or targeted demographics want. It makes it so you can analyze your customer behavior through the quality traffic that is driven by SEO. It helps you understand your customers more and can help you plan on steps you can take to attract or connect with them.
- Increased mobile traffic: SEO-friendly websites that are mobile-friendly have an advantage in attracting customers and driving more traffic than websites that aren’t mobile-friendly or don’t use SEO.
How Do I Make My Website SEO Friendly?
Knowing the benefits of SEO doesn’t necessarily make a website SEO friendly. Making an SEO-friendly website requires a fair amount of strategizing, writing, web development, custom coding, and creativity. There has to be work put into the content of the website, and it requires a commitment to developing that content. This process can pay off for a franchise as it brings more people to that business while allowing you to understand your customers and core demographic more.
There are several tips to keep in mind when making an SEO-friendly website design for your franchise or business, such as:
- The URL should be simple but descriptive enough that it can tell the user what the webpage is about. A URL that is simple and expressive also ranks better on search engines than a URL that is neither of those things.
- There should be links to social media on the website. Include links to popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube so users can get a more casual and informal view of the franchise.
- Websites should be updated regularly. Also, regularly refresh your content. Content should relate to the franchise. It also needs to relate to users and provide answers to their questions.
- Websites should be original. The content needs to be original and shouldn’t be imitations or carbon copies of other websites since search engine bots can see and compare the content. Duplicate content can cause your site to be penalized in search engine rankings. The content on your website should represent your franchise and create an image and identity that the user can look at.
- SEO-friendly websites should have good hosting. A slow website can annoy users as well as limit visibility for search engine crawlers. Slow load times can cause the crawlers to ignore the content on the website and make your website less visible to users.
- Keyword stuffing should be avoided. Keywords are an essential part of keeping a website SEO friendly but shouldn’t be overused since that, too, can penalize your website.
- Adding keywords to areas outside your website copy can help increase SEO. Keywords can be added to areas like metadata fields, image titles, and folder names.
- Keep your content an appropriate length. For SEO purposes, content should generally be above 300 words.
SEO is something that any franchise should learn and understand to build true brand equity. By building an SEO-friendly website, you can increase the amount of business and recognition that your franchise receives. Executive Digital can help you position your franchise for online growth. Please contact Executive Digital today to learn more about how our SEO strategies can help.