To drive more traffic to your website, you need to give visitors a reason to keep coming back.

Your content needs to be high quality, recent and relevant.

But you also need an SEO strategy. Search engine optimization is a valuable marketing tool that drives organic traffic — meaning potential clients and customers — to your website.

With more than 4 billion Google searches every day, you need to make sure your web site is optimized for SEO.

Don’t let your website become a crisis situation – it should be updated every three or so years. It’s the first impression a visitor has of your organization.

Keywords are at the heart of a strong SEO strategy. These are words or phrases that someone plug into a search engine like Google that bring them to your site.

Here are some simple ways to improve your Google SEO results.

• Make sure your site has a fast load speed (of three seconds or less) -if your load speed is too slow, Google will recognize this, and it will harm your ranking. A slow website will also impact the way your website visitors engage with your pages – they can get frustrated and never return.

• Use clean URLs and meta descriptions

• Develop target keywords (which have high search volume, relevance to your business and low competition)

  • Include the primary keyword in the page’s title tag and meta description

• Use optimized headlines (include your target keywords)

• Include a primary long-tail keyword naturally in the text but don’t practice “keyword stuffing”

• Make sure every page on your website includes at least 300 original words of content

• Continually update your existing top-performing content

• Include at least one piece of “rich” content, like an image, infographic or video. Search engines recognize that this adds value to the content and will rank the page higher accordingly.

• Always describe your image and video media using alt tags, or alternative text descriptions. They allow search engines to locate your page.

• Use the plug-ins that come with your web site to optimize your content. If your site is on WordPress there are several plug-ins that can help you enhance your on-page SEO efforts.

• Focus on local SEO and create a Google My Business profile

• Ensure your content is created around a primary keyword and relevant secondary keywords

• Use backlinks – links from high-authority, high-traffic domains are the most valuable and worth pursuing as part of your digital marketing strategy. There are many effective link building methods, from creating shareable infographics to writing guest posts on other platforms.

• Include internal links to increase dwell time

• Make sure your site is mobile friendly

• Title metadata creates the page titles displayed at the top of a browser window and the headline within search engine results. It is the most important metadata on your page. Create a meta title for each webpage based on your page title rich with keyword phrases.

• Use effective header tags to potentially become a Google Featured Snippet

• Identify low-performing pages and refreshing them with new content

• Fix linked 404s and take over links that belong to competitors’ 404s

• Avoid duplicate content, which can harm your Google search rankings

Another factor that impacts your SEO ranking is dwell time. This relates to how much time people spend on your website per visit. Web sites with useful and informative content will keep people there longer.

SEO is important to ensure the success of your content – don’t ignore it! What else would you add to this list?