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Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a great benefit to any website that is dependent on sales. Search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality of a website so that it is more apt to be ranked on search engines. Businesses that incorporate SEO into their marketing efforts will often times sell more than their counterparts.

In this blog post, we will cover an assortment of SEO aspects with some proven website consulting tips and suggestions.

When it comes to increasing the sales and profitability of your website, you must be ranked ahead of your competition on search engines. It is that simple. The majority of the searching audience on Google does not even acknowledge website listings that occur “below the fold.” Because of this, webmasters must take SEO into account in order to even have a chance against higher ranking websites on Google search results.

Here are three ways that you can improve your website’s sales and profits using actionable SEO tactics.

1. Include a clear call to action on your website. Too many business owners ignore a compelling call to action on their websites. This is one of the most important aspects of a website that sells products and/or services. If you don’t lead your visitors down your sales path in an easy and effective manner, you will lose money to your competition.

You literally have just a few seconds to captivate and hold the attention of your website visitors. In that time, you have to impress your audience with a striking, clean website look and feel. Also, you must feature a button for your visitors to access to start your sales funnel. This button should be bold, colorful and also, above the fold of your website’s homepage. Do not leave the task of finding out how to pay you money to your website’s visitors. Show them right away how they can purchase your product.

Take note that calls to action are not merely for websites that sell products. Websites can make use of calls to action in the form of non sales conversions as well. If the main purpose of your website is to get opt in emails, then feature a call to action that prompts your visitors to sign up for your newsletter. Make this opt in feature short and to the point. The button to sign up should be bright and bold leaving no room for confusion.

2. Target your audience with selective, researched keywords. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Sometimes it isn’t smart to target the most popular and most highly searched keywords in your niche market. Using keyword research tools, consider targeting keyword phrases that are still frequently searched, yet not as competitive.

Google’s free keyword research tool can be a wonderful resource for finding alternate keywords to target. Use Google’s tool to search for what you think are the most popular search terms for your niche market. From there, take a look at the suggested keywords that Google displays along with the number of estimated searches. Targeting keywords in this fashion enables you to take advantage of “low lying fruit” so to speak. For very competitive markets, this strategy really works well. You may be surprised at the amount of people who search with alternate terms. Alternate terms that are more specific yield a more targeted visitor to your website.

Once you have your list of keyword phrases that you’d like to target, you can then incorporate them into the copy of your website. This is also a critical SEO step. By including instances of your keywords in the text of your website, you are increasing your “relevancy” to a search engine for your desired terms. When a search engine bot crawls through your website, you want to be sure that your keywords are mentioned more than a few times. Search engines store all of the text that they find on websites and will serve it to their audience in the form of search results. In other words, when you search various keywords on Google, you are accessing their database of stored websites that contain the given keyword. So, when you include your keywords in the text of your website, you are thus helping your chances of being shown as a search result.

3. Communicate with your audience and followers. With online sales, customer confidence is crucial to your bottom dollar. A blog is a great way to “humanize” your website more so than your competition.

Online businesses do not have the luxury of face to face meetings in most cases. They don’t have the chance to make a customer feel comfortable to buy from them on a person to person level. This is one of the greater challenges of selling online exclusively. By making use of a company blog though, you can make your audience feel more comfortable. Your potential customers can see success stories from other real people. You can also show how dedicated you are to your customers by answering all of their questions via your blog.

A blog can be a direct source of back links to your website as well. Google now places a lot of importance on the quality of a website. They are making a strong effort to replace websites made up of poor content with ones that have updated content. The better information that you post in your blog, the more links you will receive from other domains. Google will reward a better ranking to websites that have more links that point back to them. Links to your website should be looked at as popularity scores. The more links, the more popular Google views your website.

Sales are the heartbeat of just about any business. You can increase the profitability of your website by making it easier for your visitors to buy from you. Showing your responsiveness and industry expertise with a blog will help you increase your customer confidence level as well.

John Morinaga is a SEO consultant with over 11 years of direct experience. He is the Account Director at SEOWebsiteHelp.com. SEOWebsiteHelp.com is an expert on page SEO optimization and link building company based in Lake Elsinore, California. His SEO blog features many expert tips on increasing the ranking of websites on search engines.