Local SEO has never been a stronger ally than now, especially for small and medium-sized businesses

hoping to step up their game. Of course, because of the number of new trends being set day in and day out when it comes to search engine optimization in Chicago, it does get challenging to swim with the tide and still come up with the results you are expecting. With these tips below, you can help your business not just to stay afloat, but to actually excel and be recognized.

• Stick to relevant content.

This will always be a basic rule when it comes to SEO in Chicago. You may be working with the best in Chicago web design, but without relevant content to back you up, all you efforts will be in vain.

Don’t just talk about what’s trending at the moment, especially if it does not exactly fit your niche. Think about what’s most relevant to your target audience and focus on that. This way, they know that you truly want to give them the value they’re looking for.

• Be mindful of how you present links.

Reading through content that’s filled to the brim with “Click here” is not only distracting, it does not bring any real value to your content. If you find any relevant keyword that can be linked to an external or internal source, then go ahead and add a hyperlink to the exact keyword instead of adding “Click here” after the statement. This makes the content more natural in flow and allows your readers to go through the text with more focus.

• Don’t underestimate the power of alt tags.

Any expert in Chicago UX design will tell you that visuals on every page will pull up your rankings. However, don’t think that just because you already have all the videos and images you need, the clicks will start pouring down. Aside from the visual content, make sure you add alt tags to each relevant image and video as well.

Alt tags are alternative text descriptions that allow search engines to recognize images and videos. Without alt tags, your images and videos are invisible to the search bots crawling through the internet. But when you assign relevant keywords to each of them, the text will be recognized, allowing your chosen search engine to pick up your visual content.

• Steer clear of popular keywords.

Wait, what? Aren’t we supposed to use keywords that majority of people use? Although this is the common practice, you have to realize that going for the more popular keywords would mean having to compete with all of your other competitors in ranking.

Go for a more specific keyword that may not be on top of the list, but still has a pretty good chance of being picked up. Remember that having the chance to be seen by 100 people out of 1000 who typed in a popular keyword does not really count much. What matters is being seen by 100 out of 100 people who typed in a less popular set of keywords.

With so many people searching for a product or service like yours, it’s impossible not to have any chance of luring them in. All it takes is following these tips – the rest will follow.