Digital migration has become a regular buzzword in just about every industry. Business owners are looking for ways to beef up their virtual presence. So how can you increase your visibility in an online space where businesses from all over are competing to sell? Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective ways to help achieve that so qualified leads will find you.

SEO is how search engines recognize that your content is valuable regarding certain topics. When you improve SEO, you are trying to optimize your site to land higher on the search results pages.

Because Google is considered the leader of the U.S. search market (61.7%), that is typically the algorithm people look at when attempting to improve their site to meet the requirements of search engines.

Algorithms are the rules that the search engines operate by. Search engines send out site crawler bots (or spiders) to sort through website code and index them by value for various keywords. The algorithms that determine that value change every day, so it's hard to find a clear and fast answer on how to best optimize for search.

If you can't get your business page in front of people searching for your product or service, then you might have a hard time meeting your business goals. With search engine optimization, you are given a chance to attract leads already searching for what you offer or something related to your company.

Because so many sites are vying for top positions and the algorithm rules are continually changing, SEO is a difficult thing to truly master. However, there are some things you can do right now to help your site draw more leads and qualified traffic.

You will be automatically penalized if your pages take too long to load or loads poorly on mobile. Use a responsive design with compressed images that are less than 200k in size and around 800px in length for most uses. You can check your website page speed with the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.

If you are a small business, you should target the local crowd as probable customers. Local resources are extremely valuable to your business.

And – good news for you – local search is less competitive when it comes to ranking keywords. This means you need to start writing content specific to the areas you are targeting.

The more pages you have on your site, the more chances you will have to show up in searches. You can increase your pages by adding location-specific landing pages, increasing your services pages, creating resource pages or writing a blog.

When it comes to writing content for your pages or blog, the best pieces are going to answer real questions your audience has. Google is looking for answers that line up as closely as possible with the user query. You have a huge advantage when you are writing value that really answers that question. Plus, you will start to gain trust as a leader in your industry when you provide relevant content for your audience.

Whenever you search for local shops, professionals or food, the Google profiles are the ones that pop up with the map location, phone number, ratings and site link. Fill out your Google My Business profile for free to make sure your listing has the correct information, pictures and site link.

There are many other ways to improve SEO but consider this as a starting point. Keep assessing and improving your site to build a solid online presence for your company.