Businesses want potential customers and clients to be able to find them, and that is why it is important to use SEO for Bay Area businesses. Improving SEO can go a long way toward putting your business at the top of the Google search results page. There are some simple strategies you can use to make your efforts more effective.

• Improve user experience to make the biggest impact. Quality content and a pleasant user experience will cause users to share your site, to come back often, and increase your ranking in search engines. No matter what else you do, if your site doesn’t have quality content, your ranking will end up dropping.
• Speed is also very important. If a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, over half of users will leave without waiting. There are tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights that will assist you in ascertaining the load time of your site. AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a protocol that allows nearly instant loading of mobile pages that will help to overcome any load time issues your site may have.
• Shorter URLs can be helpful, probably at least partly due to ease in navigation. Generally, no more than five words is a good rule to follow. Put your main keywords at the beginning of the URL for best results.
• Longer content, with related keywords, has been shown to be an excellent way to increase search engine rankings. Articles that rank higher tend to be between 1,200 and 2,000 words. However, the content must be well written and focused to be considered appropriate quality. Inside that content, include words and phrases that connect with your topic, that people may use to find your content. Be thorough, while being interesting.
• Long tail keywords – that is, keywords that include more information such as locality and brand name – have also been shown to be useful.
• Optimize for mobile – while it has been of growing importance for quite some time to have a mobile version of your business web site, as of November 2016, Google has been indexing mobile-friendly sites first. If your site only works properly on a desktop computer, then it is certainly going to be ranked lower than similar sites that are optimized for mobile devices.
• Voice searching is much more common in today’s world. Using conversational keywords will help people to be more likely to find your site when using voice searching.
• Because search engines include content from all over the world, it is more important than ever to optimize for locality, especially when your business offers local services.
• Link building – emphasize quality over quantity. Having thousands of link-farm sites linking to your site will not only be unhelpful, but also detrimental. Having a dozen sites that are legitimate, related sites link to your site will be infinitely more helpful. However, keep in mind that links alone will not increase your ranking. They only work in tandem with quality content.
• Rich answers and topical authority work hand in hand. Rich answers are what they call it when the search engine displays the answer above the search result list. Some ways to get your site’s answer to show up in the rich answers location include: lists, question-and-answer pages, and asking the question as a part of your content, along with a direct answer and further information. Additionally, offering comprehensive content about a subject will increase the topical authority attributed to the page by the search engines, and this outranks specific keyword optimization, in some cases.
• Personal branding is a way of creating a niche for yourself in the vast, crowded cyberspace world. Branded URLs are one way to do that, though not the only. Consistency across platforms will go a long way toward this, too.
• Using the secure protocol HTTPS rather than the more common HTTP will also increase your ranking. You may have noticed that more sites are using HTTPS now, and this is a large part of the reason why.
• Use social media to help get users’ attention, and promote your content. Consistency of information across all platforms (that is, name, address, phone number, etc.) will also increase your findability in search engines.

Remember Google isn’t the only search engine. While many people do prefer Google, there are still many who use Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines. Ranking on them can be helpful to your SEO for your Bay Area business, as well.