SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become an important part of digital marketing. Anyone who has been in digital marketing will at least be somewhat familiar with SEO.
With over 5 billion searches done every day — with Google taking most of the market share — it is a no-brainer that search engines are a key place to advertise your site.
What is SEO?
SEO or search engine optimization is the process where your page or website gets more visibility in search pages like Google. It helps drive traffic to your website which directly affects your ROI.
There are elements of SEO that help your digital marketing strategy:
Keywords
This is probably the first thing that comes to mind when talking about SEO. This was perhaps one of the first techniques of SEO that people used in developing awareness of their brand. Though there are other techniques used today, keywords still hold relevance in the SEO world.
Keywords are words or phrases that both brands and prospects use to either connect to online content (for brands), or search online content (for prospects). One important thing to remember when using keywords is to use keywords with high search rates and low competition.
Content
The actual meat of your webpage. This is what your readers will consume when they land on your page, and this is one of the most important elements of SEO. Your content needs to be engaging, educational, and relevant. Create blogs or content that are useful to prospects and provide them with information relevant to your webpage.
For example, you and your brand are promoting virtual services like virtual event hosting, you could write blogs around virtual hosting, the important things to consider when hosting your own virtual event, and slide in the services that your brand provides for virtual events. Provide your audience and your prospects with content that is relevant and informative. Something that sticks to their brains the next time they need virtual hosting services so that the first thing they think of is your brand.
Search Engine Marketing
This is basically paid to advertise. If you have the advertising budget, search engine marketing might be for you. This involved ads, ads, and more ads, all to direct traffic into your pages and drive viewership. It can come as native ads, pay-per-click, social media ads, and more.
Links
Links are a major ranking factor for SEO. However, not all links are created equal. You need high-quality links on your web pages. Avoid using spam links and bad links. One or two bad links on your page are not that much of a big deal, but more than that is a bad idea. The idea is to build yourself a good link profile that will set you apart from everyone else. A way to do this is to use various types of links, provided that these have been vetted and are not spammy or bad in nature.
The importance of SEO in digital marketing
Now that we have an understanding of what SEO is and some of its elements, let us take a look into why SEO is important in digital marketing.
Digital marketing is a marketing component that uses the internet and all manner of digital technology to promote products and services. The main goal here is to generate leads and drive qualified traffic into your pages that will, down the line, positively affect your profits.
This is where SEO comes in: lead generation. Your keywords, content, and links all come down to generating qualified traffic into your pages.
Say you are promoting meaningful movements by companies that want to host a walking meeting to get more people interested in your services. To drive traffic to your website, you can use SEO. Append keywords, make sure the blog you write is relevant (this covers your content), use good quality links, maybe throw in some ads to help promote your webpage even more, and monitor the traffic of your website. Based on the feedback and data gathered, you can adjust your website to get even more people interested.
SEO affects:
Visibility
SEO increases visibility. This is one of the major reasons why there is SEO in the first place: to make your pages more visible. Increased visibility equals increased rankings. The higher you rank in search engine results pages, the more visible and accessible you are to your prospects. Visibility also increases brand awareness. When your website always comes up on top when they do their searches, it creates better recall and increases the probability of your products and services being purchased.
Traffic
If your website is more visible to your audience, the more traffic your website gets. The more traffic, the higher the lead generation. Traffic and visibility go hand in hand when promoting your web pages. You need to ramp up your SEO practices in order for your website to end up on the search page’s top five positions — better yet, the top spot. This way, more prospects will find you when they use a search engine.
Customer experience
The data from all that traffic and all the tweaks you make when integrating SEO into your marketing strategy means that you are improving your website. SEO can help you streamline your content, get rid of bad links, and create better blogs or vlogs that resonate with your target audience more.
Growth
All roads lead to growth — this is your end goal. This is what all this is about — growing your business, good ROI, and increasing your customer base. SEO applied effectively will help you achieve growth. It can boost your authority, improve customer satisfaction and experience, forge better relationships with your customers, bring more people to your website, and drive conversions, which translates to increased sales and a more loyal customer base.
Conclusion
SEO is more than links and keywords. It’s a marketing tool that can help your business grow if used smartly. Learning various SEO techniques and integrating them into your marketing strategies will help you reach your target audience better and generate leads that will translate to earnings and a growing customer base.
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