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So, you just launched a beautiful new business website, complete with your logo, brand colors, photos of your work, happy client testimonials, an easy-to-use booking page—everything! All that’s left to do is sit back as site traffic soars and those new appointments start flooding in, right? Well, not so fast. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a huge role in determining your new website’s success. A website that is well-optimized for SEO not only attracts more organic traffic but also improves its visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs), ensuring that potential clients will find you when searching for the services and products you offer in their area.

Optimizing your business’s website for SEO requires an integrated approach. Below are the most common—and easiest—ways to turn your website into the supercharged lead generator it ought to be.

1. Keyword Optimization

Keyword optimization is an SEO strategy that incorporates relevant keywords into various elements of your website, such as title tags, meta descriptions, headers and body content. Doing this correctly signals to search engines what your content is about.

When choosing keywords, consider your target audience, geographic location, and specific services or specialties offered by your business. Integrate your chosen keywords naturally into the content of all your pages. Additionally, consider incorporating location-based keywords if you serve a specific geographic area.

Keywords fall into several categories:

Primary & Secondary Keywords

Your primary keyword is the focus of your page content. You only need one primary keyword per page. Secondary keywords support your main topic and are a bit more granular.

Primary keyword examples might be:

Salon services
Massage
Personal training

Secondary keywords might be:

Balayage highlights
Best spa in [city name]
CrossFit training

High-Volume & Low-Volume Keywords

High-volume keywords are search terms that have—you guessed it—high search volume. There are many people searching for those keywords across the major search engines, so they give you the chance to capture a broader audience. The difficult part is that they are incredibly competitive among businesses and difficult to rank for.

High-volume keywords could be:

Hair salon
Fitness center
Spa treatment

Low-volume keywords, on the other hand, are search terms that have a smaller search volume. There is less competition for these, and they may appeal to a specific segment that you’re trying to target. However, they have limited traffic compared to their counterparts.

Corresponding low-volume keywords might be:

Balayage highlights for dark hair
Outdoor HIIT training
Trigger point massage for athletes

Having a healthy mix of high-volume and low-volume keywords on your business’s website can help you attract a diverse range of visitors, target niche audiences and maintain a competitive edge.

Conduct Keyword Research

Conduct thorough keyword research to understand your target audience and create content that aligns with your business's offerings and the needs of your customers.

Free keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner can help you figure out which words and phrases related to your business are getting the most traffic on Google. You can then build your page’s content around those phrases.

Another of Google’s tools, Google Trends, lets you see what topics are trending most in your target regions.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is using the same keywords repeatedly—and awkwardly—throughout your site to influence search rankings. Keyword stuffing creates poor user experience and sends the wrong message about your business. Moreover, search engines can penalize keyword-stuffed pages—or even your entire website—for the practice. In particularly egregious cases, they may even remove your site from SERPS (search engine results pages) entirely.

Don’t try gaming the search engines by adding invisible keywords on your pages (e.g. white fonts against white space) or on the backend of your website builder, either. Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines are too advanced for that.

Website structure refers to how all your pages and their content (copy, images, headers, footers, links, banners, etc.) are grouped. A clear, logical and easy-to-navigate structure is key for your business’s website, and a hallmark of strong website design. Poor, confusing site structure means a poor user experience, which adversely affects SEO.

Two important things to remember with regards to site structure:

Have a clear menu structure with common menu labels that is maintained throughout the site
Make sure your CTAs (Calls to Action) are clear, clickable and go to the right place

People should be able to navigate and find any page on your site in just a few short clicks/seconds. Put yourself in a prospective client’s shoes. Imagine they’ve arrived at your website for the first time. How many seconds does it take to get to that About Us page, or Services page? What, if anything, stands in the way of them making an appointment?

3. Optimize On-Page Elements

On-page SEO helps search engines understand the relevance of your content to specific keywords, increasing the likelihood of your pages appearing in results for relevant searches. Likewise, it enhances the user experience and improves clickthrough rates.

Important on-page elements include:

Title Tags

Title tags define the title of a webpage. They are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the main clickable headline for a search result. Choose unique, descriptive, and compelling title tags for each page, including your city/region, that accurately describe the content for that page and include target keywords.

Google typically displays only the first 50–60 characters of a title tag in search results, so keep it concise. Use separators like pipes (|), dashes (-), or colons to distinguish between different elements in the title when necessary for clarity.

Header Tags

Search engines use header tags to understand the hierarchy and organization of your content. Include relevant keywords in header tags to signal the topic of the content to search engines. Ensure that header tags accurately reflect the structure and content of the page for both users and search engines.

Use the following header tags to structure content and highlight important sections, including target keywords when necessary:

H1 Tags: The H1 tag is usually used for the main title or heading of a page. It is possibly the most important tag for SEO because it provides a clear and concise summary of the page's content. Identify a main keyword that represents your primary service or focus. Use this keyword in the H1 of your webpage.

This title should be descriptive and include your city/region if applicable, in order to show up for potential clients searching for services like yours in their area. Including your target keyword in an H1 tag can help search engines like Google better understand a page's topic. Use only one H1 tag per page for the main title.

H2 Tags, H3 Tags, etc.: H2 to H6 tags represent subheadings of gradually decreasing importance used to break down content into sections and subsections, creating a hierarchical structure. Each subsequent header tag should be used to introduce and structure content under the previous heading.

Meta Descriptions

The meta description is that snippet that appears in search engine results, so you’ll want to make it compelling to encourage clicks. Meta descriptions include your main keyword and provide a concise, accurate summary of your business.

Keep meta descriptions about 150–160 characters long, and make sure the most essential information is within this range, including your city/region, to ensure it is visible in local search results.

4. Optimize Images

Images are also, technically, on-page elements. Making your website’s images more SEO-friendly can improve your site's loading time and enhance user experience, which positively affects your search engine rankings.

Image Name

Always use descriptive file names that reflect the content of the image itself. Avoid generic names like "client001.jpg" and instead use something like "hair-balayage.jpg." This helps search engines understand what the image is about.

Image Alt Tags

Alt text (alternative text) refers to the text description associated with an image. It serves several purposes, including providing accessibility for visually impaired users and offering context to search engines. Include relevant keywords in your alt text, but make sure it accurately describes the content of the image. Add geotags to images to provide location information to search engines.

Image Size

Large image files can slow down your website's loading time, a sign of poor business website design. Resize images to the dimensions needed for display on your site. Using a free image compressor, like tinypng, to reduce file sizes (without sacrificing too much quality) can positively affect your site's performance, especially on mobile devices.

Image Format

Choose the image format that best fits your needs. JPEG format is generally suitable for photographs, while PNG is better for images with transparency. WebP is a modern format that provides quality at smaller file sizes.

While preferences vary concerning image size, the Design Services Team at Vagaro prefers 1500–2000px wide for hero banners, with regular images in the 400–600px range. In fact, Vagaro businesses using MySite can leave this—and every—technical design decision to Vagaro’s Design Services Team if they choose.

5. Optimize for Mobile

Mobile responsiveness refers to how well your website can adapt to different devices and screen sizes, particularly smartphones and tablets. Google heavily considers mobile-friendliness in its ranking algorithm, so a mobile-responsive website can improve your search engine rankings, which enhances your online visibility.

Additionally, over half of the world’s web traffic comes from mobile devices, and if the experience is poor, visitors will leave immediately. To prevent that from happening, consider the following:

Responsive Design

Use responsive web design to create a flexible layout that adapts cleanly and instantly to different screen sizes and resolutions. Modern website builders, like Vagaro’s MySite ensure a consistent and user-friendly experience across various devices.

Navigation should be as simple as possible for mobile users. Use a mobile-friendly menu, such as a hamburger menu (three horizontal lines), or touch-friendly dropdown menus that activate by tap, to save space and make it easy for users to access different sections of your site.

Font Size & Type

Ensure that your text is legible by using a font size that is easily readable on smaller screens. Avoid tiny font sizes that might require users to zoom in to read content. It’s also wise to avoid overly decorative (Serif) fonts, opting instead for Sans-serif fonts (Aria, Helvetica, Open Sans, etc.), which are cleaner and more readable at smaller sizes.

Touch-Friendly Buttons & Links

All buttons and links should be large enough and easily tapped with a finger. Recommendations vary, but a recommended minimum touch target size should be between 42 and 72 pixels¹. Avoid inserting small, inaccessible links into body text that might be difficult to find and tap on.

Mobile SEO Optimization

Ensure that your mobile site is optimized for search engines. Use the same meta tags, structured data, and content as the desktop version. Google primarily uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking.

6. Create Quality Content

Create informative, engaging and localized content that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience. Regularly update and refresh your content to keep it relevant and valuable.

Use a variety of content types, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, and more, to cater to different user preferences. With a robust website builder, like Vagaro’s MySite, you can create a link on your homepage for a blog that you can fill with informative articles.

The same rules apply to informative content as everything else:

Ensure that your content is consistent with your niche and aligned with your target audience’s interests. For ideas, use some of those keyword research tools we mentioned above.
Always optimize images, infographics, videos and multimedia elements for faster loading times.
Be sure to add text to these elements on the page so search engines like Google understand what they are when crawling your website.

Remember that social media content, such as how-to videos, contests and before-and-after photos, is also important, because it creates in-bound traffic to your website.

7. Optimize for Local SEO

Local SEO involves how visible your business is in local search results on Google. Optimize your website for local searches by claiming and perfecting your Google Business Listing (formerly Google My Business).

Your Google Business Listing enables you to appear in Google Search results when people search for businesses like yours in your area. It also makes you visible on the Google Maps app. Not only is claiming your Google Business Profile essential for small businesses, it’s also free and Google walks you through the process.

Once you’ve claimed your Google Business Profile:

Include the link to your website, as well as your business’s name, address, phone number, business categories & business hours, ensuring that all business information is correct.
Include high-quality images of your business space, services and any products you sell.
Encourage customer reviews and respond promptly to improve local search rankings.
Remember, also, that you can—and should—include/embed your Google My Business Listing on your website.
Monitor your local SEO using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Track local keyword rankings, organic traffic, and customer reviews.

8. Create Local Back Links

Back links are links acquired from other websites within your local community or industry. Back links are important because they improve your website's authority and visibility in local search results.

You can build local back links in several ways:

By collaborating with other local businesses and organizations, sponsoring events, or participating in festivals and other community activities.
By offering positive testimonials about local businesses and organizations, for which they will likely provide links to your website on theirs in return.
By listing your business in local online directories, such as chamber of commerce websites or local business associations.
By reaching out to local news media to possibly cover some unique aspect of your business or services.

Back link acquisition is also another benefit of creating useful, informative, entertaining and engaging content centered around your professional niche(s). The more consistent and robust your content is, the greater your reputation as an authority on that subject becomes. As a result, respectable businesses, local influencers or associations will provide links back to your blog, website or wherever your content lives for their respective audiences to click on.

Improving your website's SEO requires a multi-pronged approach that addresses both on-page and off-page factors. However, it’s not as technical or time-consuming as it may sound. By focusing on keyword optimization, content quality, a few technical aspects and the user experience, you can create a website that consistently performs well in search engine rankings. Businesses using Vagaro MySite have an advantage in that they have an ultra-responsive and branded website designed with SEO best practices and a seamless user experience in mind. Of course, a website is just the beginning. Sign up for your 30-day FREE trial and experience the many advantages Vagaro has to offer your business!

References:

https://serpstat.com/blog/which-fonts-buttons-and-colors-to-use-in-the-mobile-version-of-a-website