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There was a time that when you needed a plumber, you’d get the Yellow Pages out, find the listings for them under ‘P’, and call those with the most convincing ads. Out of those, you would decide which was the best one to fix your leaky faucets.

Things have changed, as this business directory has gone from being big enough to knock somebody out cold, to being slimmer than a runway model.

In some areas, publication of the Yellow Pages has been discontinued entirely. This fact should tell you something, and it is this…

You need a website, and you needed it yesterday

The Yellow Pages themselves have now made the shift to the web. However, the former king of directories are struggling to catch up, as when people search for local pizza places these days, the vast majority type in ‘pizza places in X’ in either Google or Bing.

Plainly and simply: if you don’t have a website representing your business, you won’t be on the radar of anyone typing in relevant search queries into their smartphones or their desktop.

Depending on a rapidly aging demographic to find your listing in the phone book, or for others to stumble across your business on foot is not a sustainable marketing strategy anymore.

What is SEO anyway?

So you finally set up a page for your business using a web development platform such as Wix. Great!

This is a huge step towards the ongoing success of your business, but know that it is only one piece of your overall online marketing strategy.

Now that you have built the platform where potential customers can learn about the products and services you have to offer, you need to direct people to it. This is where SEO or Search Engine Optimization comes in. What is SEO?

Quite simply, it is the process of optimizing your website so that search engines will rank it higher in their results for keywords that your target market is searching for.

If you own a landscaping company in Portland, Oregon, building relevant content on a regular basis that contains key terms such as ‘lawn care in Portland’ or ‘best landscapers in Oregon’ will cause your site to rise in the rankings for those terms in the months after starting your blogging campaign.

What are the basic components of SEO that I need to know about?

When non-tech savvy folks check out established blogs like SEMrush and Moz, they see a variety of cutting edge techniques that are exotic and confusing to them, leaving the impression that SEO is too complex to learn themselves.

However, the basic components of SEO have largely stayed the same over time, and are easy to learn. Major website building tools such as Wix have made it simple for busy owners to implement these principles in every blog post they publish.

Wix SEO features include a number of tools that make it easy to make your site more visible to the major search engines. With the ability to do 301 redirects (if you ever have to move a page on your site), and site verification tools that will make sites like Google, Bing and Pinterest aware of your existence, you can boost your site’s profile for the key terms that you seek to target.

Additionally, Wix offers a blog utility that allows you to create content relevant to your field on a regular basis. With easy-to-use input fields for headers, meta tags, and alt image descriptions, it is simple to promote your posts as well, thereby boosting the overall visibility of your website on the internet.

In the past, you would have to dive into the raw HTML code of each post will perform these tasks. However, thanks to intuitive tools such as Wix, this can be done quickly and efficiently, freeing up more of your time to work on the core functions of your business.

If you are still confused on how to make use of any of these powerful tools, read this Wix SEO Review, and you’ll get the hang of them in no time.

However, this brings up an issue that has been brought up by many lately. Some have been told by their techie friends that Wix SEO pales in comparison to what can be offered through other platforms.

Wix believes in their product so strongly that they are offering $50,000 to anyone who can outrank them for the term “SEO heroes” over a 4 month period from December 16.

Do they feel like making some extra pocket change? Tell them about it, and we’ll see if they can put their money where their mouth is.

I’m driving more traffic to my site … now what?

Now that you have got more traffic driving to your domain, you’ll get a chance to see what your visitors are doing once they arrive.

However, it is nearly impossible to draw any definitive conclusions without the help of an app that is capable of collecting and organizing data in a useful fashion.

Thankfully, anybody that creates a site using Wix will have Google Analytics pre-installed. This program will provide you with information ranging from bounce rates (the number of visitors that leave a page within a very short time) to referring URL’s (helpful for focusing on strengths and fixing weaknesses).

Using these data sets and countless others, you’ll have all the evidence you’ll need to make the adjustments to have the best ranking website in your niche.

The information revolution has fundamentally changed business … don’t get left behind

Stuck in the ways of the past, many business owners have opted to limp along with their existing clientele, who are aging and slowly dwindling in number with every passing year.

As such, they run the risk of being left behind by a world that now relies on the web for information and recommendations.

Don’t let this be your fate. Join the 21^st century by establishing your web presence today!