When your business is fraught with competition, standing out from the sea of similar companies is probably of utmost importance to you–and that’s where online marketing can really come in handy. While having social media is definitely a good start, having a website for your business is perhaps even better, especially if your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is great. Thankfully, you don’t have to pay an outside company to make your business website SEO-friendly. Here are 5 ways to easily boost your business’s SEO rating.

1. Find the best keywords
   First and foremost, to increase a website’s SEO you need to know what people are searching for. If you don’t know what the most searched keywords are pertaining to your business, and which ones have the lowest competition, you won’t be able to accurately plan your top keyword list. If you aren’t familiar with how to research this information on your own, you can use keyword tracking software instead.
2. Put your business keywords first…and everywhere
   Once you come up with about five to ten keywords and phrases that people are most often searching for, you should prioritize adding those everywhere you can on your website–while keeping it sounding organic. For example, if your business is XYZ Gym, a local gym in Florida, you may consider having a tagline right after your company name reading “Gym in Tampa, Florida,” and adding this same phrase in as many areas as possible on your site (including the metadata). Though it might not seem like it matters, when your website is indexed by search engines they will use these keywords to rank your site based on how well it matches what people are searching for the most–and it’s more likely that “Gyms in Tampa” will be searched for more than “XYZ Gym”.
3. Start a blog
   There are only so many words you can add to your main pages without it sounding like it was written for bots, and that’s why integrating a blog into your website is an amazing keyword tool. Not only do blogs allow you to add more keywords to your site, it also gives your audience a better understanding of your expertise. You can further use the blog to connect with your audience by sharing it on social media channels.
4. Backlink
   Adding things like backlinks to reputable sources into your website and blog posts is important as search engines will rank your site higher depending on its reliability. For example, if you are researching information on why running is good for your health and you just link the information you found to a random website that made up all of their facts, your site will not be indexed as a trusted source. Alternatively, when you backlink your facts to reputable websites like news channels and scholarly studies, it suggests that your content is credible.
5. Ask for backlinks
   Sit back and watch other people do the hard work for you with this point. You want your website to be a trusted source of information that other blogs and websites pull information from to reference because when they do that and backlink to your website, it gives your site an SEO boost too! They are essentially doing your job for you. So, don’t be afraid to conduct studies or collect information that can be referenced on other sources–and of course, always ask that your information (and website) is given proper credit.

And one last thing–remember that no matter how good your SEO is, it will still take time to rank high on search engines. Patience and consistency will be your key to success!