Category: SEO

Five SEO Must-Haves to Make It Work

If you’re putting time, money, and effort into your website but still not showing up on Google—or worse, not converting visitors into customers—then it’s time to take SEO seriously. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t a magic trick. It’s a strategic framework that, when executed properly, brings targeted traffic, builds trust, and drives real results.

Here are five essential SEO must-haves every website needs to get found, rank higher, and convert more customers:

1. SEO Must-Haves Include Keywords That Match Search Intent

Random keywords won’t cut it. You need to understand what your ideal customers are searching for. That means identifying high-value, low-competition keywords that match the intent behind their search. Whether it’s informational (“how to…”) or transactional (“buy [product] near me”), aligning your content with what people are actively looking for is non-negotiable.

2. Compelling, Optimized Content

Google loves fresh, useful content—and so do your prospects. Your blog posts, landing pages, and service pages should be optimized with keywords naturally woven into engaging content. But don’t write for robots. Write for humans first, then fine-tune for SEO. Quality content builds trust, increases time on page, and signals authority to search engines.

3. Clean, Mobile-Friendly Website Design

Over 60% of web traffic now comes from mobile devices. If your site isn’t fast, responsive, and easy to navigate on a phone, Google will penalize your rankings, and users will bounce. A clean design with simple navigation also helps search engine bots crawl your site efficiently.

4. Technical SEO Setup Is Crucial For The Five SEO Must-Haves

This is the behind-the-scenes work that makes everything run smoothly. We’re talking about site speed, XML sitemaps, meta descriptions, title tags, schema markup, and more. If these technical aspects are ignored or broken, even the best content will go unnoticed.

5. Backlinks and Local Citations

Backlinks (links from other reputable websites) and local citations (consistent business listings across platforms) are like votes of confidence for your site. The more relevant and trustworthy your backlink profile, the better your chances of rising in the rankings, especially for local SEO.

Want to know how your site stacks up?

At Cortex Marketing, we offer personalized SEO assessments to uncover exactly where your site stands—and where it needs to go to get found. Don’t keep guessing. Let’s pinpoint the gaps and opportunities with a free discovery session to discover how your five SEO must-haves stack up.

👉 Schedule a short discovery call today and let’s take the first step toward making your website work for your business. Read more about SEO…

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.

So if SEO is that simple, what’s all the confusion?

Part of the confusion is the comparison to where SEO was at 10-years-ago. Search engine optimization has always been a mix of content and good coding. You used to be able to do a lot more with the coding to help influence the way that a “search engine robot” — or simply “bot” — would search through your site you see if the search term was relevant to your content.

Now, bots work on an algorithm that makes the content a much “heavier-weight” in value, providing a better search-term result for the person searching the relevant search term. The term “weight” is the term used to express the value of the components that make up an optimized website or webpage.

In the world of Search Engine Optimization, content is king!

The weighting is constantly analyzed by search engines for different factors. However, experts agree that the content of a website is one of the most important criteria for ranking in search engines.

So how much content do I need? Well, the optimum length for a webpage or a blog is a minimum of 300 words, however, we also know that longer content produces higher search rankings… so is longer, better? Not really, it all depends on your goal(s); simply put, studies show that longer content dominates page one of search rankings. Webpages and blogs with 900 or more words are considered “cornerstone content” and this gives the highest weight to the search engine bots for a positive return.

So what SEO do I have to do to optimize my site?

Well, the first thing that we do is take a look at the site and the content and the coding. There are so many things that come into play as far as factors of what the search engine optimization companies, like Google and Bing, I’m looking for in the results that they returned for you. this is their value proposition, in general: “Delivering the best search results based upon what you are actually searching for.”

That said, SEO is much deeper than it used to be 10-years-ago — and for that matter even 5-years-ago!!  SEO is a balance between what topic you have on your page, the length of your copy (how value-rich your content is), the keyword focus density, whether it is optimized for mobile.

So, how do I optimize my website for SEO? Here are 8 simple steps:

1. Analyze all of your website data. 
2. Conduct thorough keyword research. 
3. Produce long and value-rich content. 
4. Optimize for on-page SEO. 
5. Optimized for off-page SEO. 
6. And then Optimize the website for mobile. 
7. Speed up the pages. 
8. Get quality backlinks.

It should be noted that backlinking has been a point of much debate over the past 5 years. The reason is that a lot of SEO strategies focussed on backlinking and in 2021 the latest algorithms from the search engine optimization companies have changed the weight of backlinks to help stop search engine spamming (trying to get you to see their site because they have lots of people linking to them); the strategy now is relevant-backlinking.

Does backlinking really help my SEO?

Backlinks are essentially links from a page on one website that point to another website. If you link to another website, then they have a backlink from you.  the advantage of backlinks or because the search engines see that as a sign of legitimacy. So essentially when done correctly, backlinking can help legitimize your site and make you come up higher in search engines. 

Some search engine experts swear by them, and other search engine experts don’t give backlinks much weight. the reality is, none of us really know as the algorithms that are written by the search engine optimization companies are a very closely guarded secret. They (SEO companies) give us clues but they never really tell us exactly how much weight each component factors in. we do know, however, that content is King.

Are you looking to see how your site ranks?

I provide an evaluation for marketing efficiency and content. This $75 service is currently on sale through March 31, 2021, for 80% off or $15 and at that price, you cannot afford to be uninformed. Schedule a time for marketing efficiency and content evaluation here.  What you get is a clear report as to the things you need to do for the optimization of your website. Optimized websites will help you generate more sales and that is the goal of your Search Engine Optimization, right?

Let me be more direct, the bottom line is of your Search Engine Optimization to make your content seen by more people so you are known as the expert, which in turn leads to more sales; the reason you are in business. Read other blogs on SEO or General Marketing or Social Media or Copywriting, all of which will help you increase your sales.