The reason anyone has a website is so potential clients can see what the business offers and help the client move forward toward contacting the company or buying one of their products.
How the client finds a website through general searching, (Chinese Restaurants in Richmond, for example), is typically through Google. Google records the search based on the ‘keywords’ (Chinese, Restaurant, Richmond) and looks for websites that have matching words in strategic places in the website. This, in a nutshell, is SEO.
Using SEO so Google recognizes the keywords is how websites make their way to the top of the search listings on Google.
I took a dormant website, so dormant Google couldn’t find it by the name, and got it to page one on Google within a few weeks. I did it through the strategic use of SEO. I looked at other similar websites that were already on page one and found what keywords they were using.
Many websites in similar niches used the same keywords, but I found keywords specific to my website, which also described the niche, but which the other sites were not using prominently, and placed those words strategically in the copy of the website. The site is still on page one for these keywords after several months. The position changes, but it has stayed on that page.
This is not a typical result; it happened very quickly, whereas normally it can take months of tweaking, searching, re-tweaking, and more searching to find the right formula for a website.
Once a good ranking is achieved, it needs to be monitored, and the website regularly reviewed to keep that ranking. It’s not a done once and forget it process.
Keep in mind that this is what needs to happen if you have a website that relies on Google to find potential clients. If you are using the website as a place for clients you found elsewhere ( like Facebook, email campaigns, or Pinterest), you may not need to spend as much energy on SEO and ranking.
Having lots of visitors to the site who stay and read things or who buy while on your site will drive your ranking higher organically.
So, deciding what you want your website to do for you is the first step. Step two is to make a clear plan to achieve that goal. Step three is monitoring your website so you can see if step two is working. Rinse and repeat.