With more than 2 trillion searches a year on Google, putting your business at the forefront of searchers’ fingertips is vital. Consumers are searching for solutions to their problems. The keywords they’re typing in that relate to your business ideally put you at the top of their results.

But search engine optimization (SEO) has so many moving parts to put strategic thought into, it can be tough to know which strategies to focus on. SEO success is not just peppering your website with keywords you think will work and then calling it a day. If you’re new to SEO or are wondering why your efforts have stagnated, look at these four key areas where SEO success is built upon.

1. Research 

Before you created a business plan, you probably researched the market and your competitors. The same principles relate to your visibility online. It’s vital to use a tool like the Google Keyword Planner to see:

What keywords people are typing that relate to your business

How much competition there is for those keywords

What detailed, longtail keywords have the potential to bring you business, which you may not have even realized

Keyword research saves you time before writing. It can help you strategize what pages to include throughout your website. Keywords give you a better idea of types of blogs you can write as a guest author for other sites. They can also clue you in to future business developments, showing you the products and services people are searching for the most in your industry.

2. Use Keywords to Drive Content

If you’ve ever been stuck for ideas about what to blog about or how to format your website, search no further. The keywords you discover in your research are great places to start with content ideation. Keywords, including both general keywords and longtail keywords, can be used to:

Build out site navigation

Inspire blog and video ideas for your website

Develop guest blogging opportunities

Determine URLs, headlines, subheads and image tags

Keywords to drive content are only successful when they are presented in a way that engages the user. Keyword stuffing, where you’re adding keywords nonsensically throughout copy, results in penalties from Google. Use keywords to give you ideas for how to better position your product and service to users, so that your content is more likely to show up in their searches.

3. Design for Mobile

One of the simplest ways to improve your SEO efforts is to design for mobile devices. In 2016, Google reported it’s moving towards mobile-first indexing. With more than 60 percent of searches coming from mobile devices now, the shift makes sense. If your website still requires pinching, zooming and turning the screen to try and read it, you’re not only frustrating your potential customers. You’re also going to suffer on search engines.

Design for mobile by making sure your site loads immediately upon a mobile visit. All tabs and pages should be easy to navigate. The screen’s content should read easily, requiring no adjustments to the device the user is on. Buttons should be easy to click. The user experience should be seamless and intuitive. The more time a user spends on a site, the more that serves as a signal to search engines that your website engages users, so don’t drive mobile users off it by frustrating them.

4. Link Build Naturally

One of the most important signals to search engines that your business website is authoritative and trustworthy is the links that point back to it. There are several types of linking that your business should be concerned with to help SEO efforts:

Internal linking is linking to other pages within your website throughout your website. One of the benefits of internal linking is that it provides more relevant content to users. As users consume more pages, they spend …