When to Focus on SEO

IgnitePOST is all about helping businesses grow in the most effective way possible. That’s why we decided to write about what is perhaps one of the most important processes for any business’ success: SEO. Read on to find out more about what SEO is, when to start focusing on it, and why it should matter to you.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of tailoring your website design and content to help it appear higher up on the results list for search engines like Google or Bing. When your website is optimized for search engines, you can increase your website’s visibility and generate more traffic.

The way that it works is relatively simple. Search engines like Google analyze your site, taking into account your content to help them determine the topic or theme of your website. It also is able to determine how user-friendly the site is. This process is called crawling. Crawling helps the search engine deliver the most relevant and useful search results to its users. So, if you’ve optimized your website by ensuring that certain functionalities and keywords are present in its design and content, then you are effectively upping your website's rank on the search results list.

Why is it important?

SEO is a constant and essential component in the growth of any successful modern business. The implementation of a comprehensive SEO strategy is mutually beneficial for customers and business owners. Most people in today’s world rely on search engines to find what they are looking for. Strengthening your website’s presence will allow potential customers to discover you more easily and boost your company’s site traffic, leading directly to increased sales. Colton Miller from Boostability shares with us why it is necessary to maintain a consistent, long-term SEO strategy:

“Ideally you should begin making your online presence robust and accurate. This obviously helps your customers, but it also has a huge impact on search engines and your rankings as well. You should never stop doing SEO. As long as you have the business or want an online presence you must always be doing SEO in some form or fashion.”

- Colton Miller, Director of SEO & Social Strategy at Boostability

So when should I start focusing on SEO?

As soon as possible! The quicker you start optimizing SEO, the quicker you will start seeing results. But don’t just take it from us. We also asked the question to Chase Clymer, one of the cofounders of Electric Eye, a company that specializes in helping eCommerce businesses increase their sales. Here’s what he had to say:

“Immediately. It is never too early to focus on SEO, as SEO takes a long time to start working for your business. With your first site you should be implementing best practices from day one and investing in content. While these do not pay off as fast as paid acquisition, one great piece of content can see a return that paid acquisition can't dream of.”

- Chase Clymer, Co-Founder, at Electric Eye

So now you know: SEO optimization is something that must be started from day 1, because the long term gains for your business will overshadow any sort of paid acquisition. And it’s important to remember that SEO isn’t something that you can just get out of the way, either. It requires constant maintenance and work from the outset. Eric Hansen, Director of Marketing and Business Development and IntuitSolutions, a Bigcommerce development agency,  told us this story about clients who didn’t properly execute their SEO strategy:

“Several clients of ours come to us to help "fix" their SEO because things were done incorrectly. Often they chose a free or cheap website theme, launched their site and read that "content is king" so they started stuffing keywords into redundant blog posts. At this stage we often need to take a step back so we can take two steps forward. Rebuilding an SEO optimized website that is light in code and loads quickly, includes AMP functionality, and has a site structure that is based on keyword research is the best thing we could do. Focusing on SEO from the beginning makes it difficult for you to not see results. Do it right the first time. Don't think you can do it fast and cheap.”

- Eric Hansen, Director of Marketing and Business Development, at IntuitSolutions

By focusing on SEO early and making it a constant priority, you can avoid running into problems down the road. We’ve now shown how considering SEO from the beginning is essential. This then begs the question...

Where do I start?

Be proactive in catching mistakes before it’s too late with website audits. Website audits are a helpful way to evaluate a website’s technical framework and identify any SEO weaknesses. Here’s why Stacey Schanks, the Search Engine Optimization Manager at Daily Steals, recommends site audits:

“Technical audits are usually the lowest hanging fruit, that allow for plenty of quick opportunities to identify and resolve technical problems. Audits allow you to identify duplication, managing index bloat, adding XML sitemap to the robots.txt., optimization, internal linking opportunities and much more.

Since SEO is not a one size fits all strategy, audits are a great way to identify your site’s weakness and strengths… By taking care of your Google Index Management you focus on the pages that you do want them to focus on rather than the extraneous pages you don’t want to rank. We’ve seen an increase in keyword visibility on keywords we wanted to target increase by 200% and remove the instances of keyword cannolicatzation.”

- Stacey Schanks, Search Engine Optimization Manager, at Daily Steals

Preemptively ridding your website of technical issues and SEO obstacles ensures that it will appear in search engine results pages from the beginning and allows you to focus on the big picture.

So there you have it. SEO is an essential part of growing your business and should always be on your mind, right from the start of your business’ online presence. Once you see the results of SEO, you’ll be thankful you made it a priority.

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