So you’ve finished your website and now it’s time to go live. What’s the best way to make sure your audience or customer base can find your website? Simply put, SEO blogs—Search Engine Optimization—are the most cost effective way to build your website’s visibility.

Before you create your online retail empire, there is one thing that you must understand: SEO doesn’t build itself. It takes patience and a lot of hard work. Here are five must-have’s that will take your SEO blog from bland to boisterous.

1. Know the Basics

According to Forbes.com, there are 6 basic components that every online retailer must know in order to successfully utilize SEO: keywords, meta-tags, content, backlinks, social media, and product images.

Keywords and meta-tags work together to boost your visibility on Google (and other search engines) by driving targeted specific traffic to your product or business. A Keyword should be the main subject of your SEO post, while the meta-tag is a concise, detailed description of your post in general.

Of course, your content will always be king, with backlinks serving as its queen. Content educates your customer about the products or business while backlinks point back to other aspects of the business that are related to your post. For example: if you want to sell a new kind of volleyball, it would be beneficial to backlink a page where you are also selling a net, or sunglasses. This gives your product relevance to a wider consumer base rather than relying on niche markets.

Once you’ve generated your content, linking product images and social media will boost your targeted traffic tenfold. Search engines like Google take social media reach into account in their algorithms because they’re viewed as signals of influence and authority.  Having product images boosts your visibility by giving consumers the chance to find you through both “web” and “image” results.

2. Mobile Ready Website

SearchEngineLand.com posted an article about a Google event known in the tech-world as Mobilegeddon—where Google revamped its algorithm in April 2015 to show mobile-ready websites above all others.  Without a mobile-ready site, a business loses out on valuable facetime with their audience by being pushed deeper into search results.  This creates less traffic flow, thereby decreasing the number of chances a business has to grow its customer base.

Mobile-ready websites also give businesses an easy link to the millennial market.  Not every millennial with a smartphone is play games or texting, some of them have curious minds and a willingness to learn about the businesses they encounter. Having a mobile website gives every smartphone user accessibility to your business at their fingertips, which can drastically increase traffic flow to a website. All it takes is one click.

3. An Influential Voice

Having what’s known as an ‘Influencer’ can make or break a customer’s trust with your business. An influencer is a subject-matter expert who can generate links, shares of your blog post, and most importantly create a sense of trust between business and consumer. Your Influencer doesn’t need to be outsourced either. It can be you, someone from your business, or someone you align with.

4. Safety and Security

Now, let’s turn your influencer’s voice into sales.  Even if your influencer has a million followers on social media, SEO alone won’t generate sales unless the consumer feels as though they are accounted for in your business practices. The simplest way to accomplish this is to move your website to HTTPS. Google’s Gary Illyes—webmaster trends analyst—tweeted on August 18^th, 2015 “If you’re an SEO and you’re recommending against going HTTPS, you’re wrong, and you should feel bad.” The “S” in HTTPS stands for security (https://example.com).  Having that in your web address gives the consumer peace of mind knowing that if they are to purchase something from your site, their sensitive information (passwords, credit card info, personal info etc.) will be secure.

5. Document Your Vision

Johnathan Swift once said, “Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.” Being able to document your SEO vision will bring to light the arc of your marketing strategy to the rest of the marketing team. A team can only function as such if every member is on the same page with the rest.  Otherwise, your SEO will become disjunctive and slide further down on search results. Documenting your vision will also force you to make sense of your ideas and weed out the aspects that may not be optimal to generating traffic.