Strategy

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By Lottie

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September 2022

What is SEO in Digital Marketing?

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Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a crucial part of digital marketing, but many businesses don't fully understand what it is or how to use it effectively. As such, many businesses miss out on potential customers, sales and revenue. This comprehensive guide will enable your business to understand what SEO is in digital marketing and help you grasp its importance. You'll learn the basics of what SEO is, as well as how it can improve marketing efforts. 

Search engine optimisation: What is it and how to do it?

Search engine optimisation or SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website within search engines like Google so users find your website first.

In order to rank your website, you need to ensure your content is relevant, easy to read, and well-written.

What is SEO in digital marketing?

SEO in marketing is one of the most effective ways to grow your business's visibility online and cultivate qualified leads. SEO is an example of inbound marketing, as it's a strong concept for creating valuable content that aligns with the needs of your target audience and establishes worthwhile connections. 

Users who search online for a particular product or service will likely want to do business with you or your competitors. 

By implementing SEO strategies, you can improve your overall ranking for certain topics and keywords and using your website's analytics you'll be able to reach more organic traffic online.

Why is SEO important in digital marketing?

In this day and age, understanding the concept of SEO is a must for any business and one of the most important aspects of any digital marketing strategy, as it helps businesses gain visibility and drive traffic to their website. 

Even if you understand the importance of SEO in digital marketing, you may not be taking advantage of its full potential. To fully comprehend SEO and why it's so crucial for your online strategy, we must understand the fundamentals of SEO and how they work.

What are the different types of SEO in digital marketing?

There are a variety of different types of SEO that you can use to maximise your digital presence and reach your target market. From on-page SEO techniques like keyword optimisation to off-page SEO strategies like link building, find out more about the different types of SEO available and how they can benefit your business. 

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to optimising a website's infrastructure and underlying code to ensure its presence and Independent-ability are as efficient and effective as possible, making it easier for search engines to crawl. This takes into account elements such as page speed, copy optimisation (e.g. meta descriptions), structured data markup, redirects and 404's. By optimising your website's technical aspects, search engines can better locate the web resources on your site during the indexing process resulting in overall improved search visibility. 

As an agency, we're noticing how ranking online is only getting more complex so the work behind technical SEO is constantly evolving. 

Local SEO

Even more targeted than global SEO, local SEO focuses on optimising your digital properties for a specific geographic area. If your business addresses a physical location and caters to the local community, local SEO can help you show up in relevant local searches. By optimised content based on location-based search terms and creating content that includes geographical modifiers like district and city names, your business can be better seen by customers searching in that region. 

Local SEO also involves using online maps such as Google Maps to ensure your business is accurately identified by geolocation services. 

On-page SEO

On-page SEO can help you increase your visibility on SERPs so that more potential customers can find your business online.  On-page SEO is a marketing strategy that focuses on improving your ranking by creating great content. Additionally, it may involve ensuring that the design of the page meets usability standards and that all navigation elements are working correctly. 

If you're looking to improve your on-page SEO then we recommend using well-researched keywords, regularly creating high-quality content and ensuring your meta-tags and titles are keyword rich.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to using external sources to help improve your website's ranking. Creating content such as blog articles, infographics and videos on other websites can help build backlinks and in turn, increase your website's relevancy and trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines. Additionally, networking with influencers on social media or cultivating relationships with bloggers can also strengthen your off-page SEO efforts.  

How SEO can improve marketing efforts

We encourage the brands we work with when building a marketing strategy that incorporating SEO is a great opportunity to increase brand awareness, build connections and establish credibility in your industry. Here are some other factors SEO is important for:

Online visibility

One of the most significant goals of SEO is to increase your business's visibility, so more traffic is being driven to your website organically. The higher your rank on a search engine result page (SERP), the more likely potential customers will visit your website. Users tend to never explore past the first page of search results, so the more effective your SEO efforts, the higher your rank will be.

Better user experience

Through utilising SEO strategies, you'll be optimising your site, which will ultimately improve your user experience.

When you make your site more responsive, users will be able to access it with ease. Furthermore, a fast-loading website reduces bounce rate and encourages users to stay on your site for longer.

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Web visitors

Increasing visibility and ranking are two of the most important goals of SEO. Research shows that the top ranking spot, shown at the very top of search results and often achieved through paid advertisement, receives 33% of all clicks. Compared to the first five listings, which are reached through optimising your SEO obtain 75% clicks. So, if you want more people to see your site on the search results, then SEO techniques will help you require those top spots organically.

Authority

As a new SEO concept, authority is becoming more significant to increasing your rankings, as it shows search engines and users that your website is trustworthy, relevant and practical. So depending on how high your authority is, the higher your site will rank and the more leads you will have. 

Steps to implementing SEO in marketing

Adjusting your SEO and digital marketing strategies does not guarantee immediate results, as both require ongoing strategies and daily action to achieve long-term success.

Search rankings aim to provide the best results to their users, so to achieve a higher ranking, producing great content and optimising your site will have the best chance of increasing your visibility. Here are some of the basic steps to implementing SEO in your online marketing.

Creating quality content

Creating content that solves users' queries are considered more favourable, so if you can produce frequent informative blogs, your site will be ranked higher. 

And don't just publish new content

While posting new and frequent content helps immensely with your rankings, adjusting old content that's already published is also a great way to utilise your resources. 

To demonstrate to Google that your content still belongs on page one, you should go through your old content, update any errors, repair any broken links and replace old statistics with current data.

Understanding what your audience want

There's a lot of emphasis on creating content that understands what users are looking for when searching online, so you need to determine if your audience is looking for answers or if they're looking to shop online. Building content around this specific intent and knowing what your audience wants will help you rank. 

Keyword Research

We talked a lot about Understanding Keywords in one of our past blogs which explored the importance of keyword research. There are many reasons for researching keywords, but the two most important are for Google rankings and to create relevant content that your audience is looking for. Keywords can often give you insight into what people are searching for and help you niche your content. 

A lot of websites don't use keywords at all, thinking research is only needed occasionally when it's actually the other way around. SEO marketing strategies that regularly research, use, and update keywords are the most effective. So, utilising keywords on your blog and website will help you climb those search engine rankings.

Hone your website

SEO plays an essential role in online marketing to help your website reach more potential customers from all over the world.

We hope our guide has offered some more insight into SEO's role in digital marketing. For more information about our SEO and other marketing services, make sure to contact our cross-functional team.