SEO Tips to Benefit Any Vancouver Business

There has never been a better time than today to remind yourself that building a digital Vancouver business means knowing which SEO tips to implement first. No matter what they’re searching for, people typically turn to search engines first. The best way to grow your traffic, no matter what your business, is by creating a website with both search engines and your visitors in mind.

In today’s search engine-oriented market, SEO is the most effective way to drive traffic to your website without paying for advertisements. For small businesses with limited budgets, this can be a huge advantage when facing more established competition.  SEO (search engine optimization) is a way of structuring your website to build traffic through organic search. As opposed to paid traffic, which comes from advertisements, organic search traffic comes from high rankings in search engines and creating quality content that captures your audience. In a world where more than 31 percent of people click the first Google search result, Vancouver SEO is a crucial part of any BC business.

We understand that optimizing your website all at once can be daunting for owners of small businesses who have a lot else to do.  Our actionable Vancouver SEO tips are the best place to start -- little changes can transform your traffic.

No matter which Vancouver SEO tips you choose to implement first, the single most important thing to do is monitor those changes. If you’re not seeking professional help, this means accomplishing the following:

1. Decide on a metric to use to monitor your traffic. Is it newsletter sign-ups, product purchases, keyword rankings, or percentage of people who return to your website?
2. Start using at least one of the recommended SEO tools to help you rank higher in Google to monitor your progress.
3. Implement one change at a time. How can you know what is working if you do everything at once?

It doesn’t matter how many SEO tips you implement on your website if it isn’t structured in a way that’s easy for search engine crawlers and users to navigate. For small businesses with new websites, this means creating a hierarchy that includes:

• Pages
• Categories
• Subcategories
• Internal linking that reaffirms the site structure
• Headings

Google's crawlers and humans both love hierarchy: Having a clear site structure accomplishes your two main objectives. First, Google crawlers can quickly understand your content and rank it accordingly. Second, humans can navigate it easily, making them more likely to stay on your website, buy something from it, or return to it in the future. If your site structure is unclear, Google crawlers could miss some of your content, making it impossible for people to search for it in the first place. Bad site structure also leaves your visitors confused and likely to go somewhere else. 

Creating quality content is one of the top SEO marketing trends in 2019, whether you’re a small or large business. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Google algorithms consider content quality more than ever before. This means creating content that matches your keywords, headlines, and meta descriptions.
• Long form content will rank higher than short form.
• Writing should appeal to readers, not robots. Google algorithms are getting so sophisticated that they penalize content for keyword stuffing, a tactic designed to appeal to algorithms rather than people.
• Content doesn’t just mean text, either. Videos have significant engagement, and photos are equally important. will translate to less time spent per visitor, lower conversion rates for online retailers and less traffic as Google demotes your website based these statistics

Building a network of internal and external links is a constant process. Whether you’re an entrepreneur in Vancouver with a less-than-perfect existing site or you’re a small Burnaby business building a brand new one, one of the best SEO tips is to structure your links a little every day. Use internal linking to create site structure: For starters, it’s important to internally link every new piece of content. Otherwise, it becomes orphaned content. This means that it’s disconnected from the rest of your site. Orphaned content is difficult for Google crawler and visitors to find. If a piece of content isn’t connected to the rest of your website, crawlers can either miss it or will consider it less important, thereby ranking it lower.

Build high-quality relevant external backlinks:  Backlinks are a key factor that search engines use to evaluate your website. But today, backlink quality rather than quantity is more important than ever. Instead of spending money on cheap links that will negatively affect your traffic, website owners should create quality content that will solicit backlinks on its own and build relationships with businesses big and small in relevant fields can help you grow your backlink profile. Though buying links may have been an effective tool in the early days of search engine optimization, black hat SEO tricks like this no longer work. In fact, buying low-quality links in bulk is a sure way to have Google demote your website, which will decrease your traffic. When selecting your next Vancouver, Burnaby SEO Company, make sure they’re not doing anything resembling that.