For digital marketers, improving brand discoverability is one of the highest priorities. The more people that know your brand, the more people will invest in your products or services. To acquire new customers, you first need to increase website traffic. With 53 percent of all website traffic originating from organic search results, it’s easy to see why SEO is an essential tool for digital marketers. If you want to learn how to leverage SEO to grow your brand as a digital marketer, keep reading!
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the process of enhancing your website to amplify your brand’s visibility in organic search results when people search for services you provide, products you sell, or information on topics in your brand’s area of expertise. Increased visibility means more traffic to your website, leading to more customers and sales.
How does SEO work?
To deliver users appropriate and helpful search results, search engines follow a specific process for gathering information. The first step in this process is crawling, which is when search engines follow links and navigate sitemaps to discover new web pages. Next, search engines analyze a web page’s content and metadata and add the information they find to a database in a process called indexing. Finally, search engines use algorithms to evaluate several factors that assess the quality and relevance of a page to a specific query, a process referred to as ranking.
The ranking of a page depends on several factors, among them the meaning of a searcher’s query, the relevance of the page’s content to the searcher’s query, the quality of the content of a page, the usability of a website, and context of the searcher’s previous searching behavior. These factors are analyzed by a complex algorithm that determines page ranking in the search results.
Why is SEO important?
- Organic Visibility
One of the most vital effects of implementing proper SEO practices is increased visibility for your brand. Notably, traffic that results from SEO is organic and not paid. Search engines like Google offer pay-per-click (PPC) ads that will bring your web pages to the top of the search results, but with SEO, you don’t have to pay to see improvements. Instead, your rank in the search results is earned over time as you optimize your site. When your web pages rank higher in search results, people are more likely to find and visit your website. This increased traffic can turn into conversions, meaning people who view your site become customers.
- Credibility
Another benefit of SEO is that it helps instill trust in your brand. When browsing the search results for their query, people are more likely to check out the web pages at the top of the results page than to keep scrolling. This is because people want to know the information they’re consuming comes from a credible source, and websites that rank higher in searches are perceived as more reliable and trustworthy by consumers. When people recognize your brand as a trusted source of information, they’re more likely to visit your web pages and purchase your products or services.
- Cost-Effectiveness
As mentioned above, most search engines offer PPC ads that will boost your web pages to the top of the search results. While methods like this are helpful in a time crunch, SEO helps ensure your brand’s long-term success by expanding your reach for little to no expense. Paid advertising can be costly, and its benefits end when payment ceases. Conversely, the benefits reaped from SEO only increase over time as your web pages gain more views and backlinks, thus making SEO one of the most cost-effective ways to increase brand visibility.
How to Implement a Strong SEO Strategy
- On-Page SEO
On-page SEO, or on-site SEO, refers to the process of optimizing the content of a website for users and search engines. This includes keywords, metadata, internal links, content length, site structure, multimedia, and more. With on-page content, keywords are one of the most important components.
Keywords are the terms and phrases your potential customers will use in their search engine queries. To find out which keywords are most relevant to your target audience, you’ll need to do some research. Once you’ve gathered your list of keywords, you can use them to optimize your title, URL, meta-title, meta-description, and the first 100 words of content on your web page. By including keywords in your content, you can demonstrate the relevancy of your page’s content to search engines, helping boost your page’s rankings in the search results for related queries.
- Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO, or off-site SEO, involves the strategies used outside a website to elevate its search engine rankings. This includes backlinks, social media marketing, public relations (PR), ratings and reviews, brand building, and more. When search engines are looking for the most relevant search results to feed users, one of the factors they consider is popularity. To gain popularity, your website needs to acquire backlinks, which are referrals to your content from other websites.
For example, if another website uses your articles as a reference in its content and links to your site, either within the content of the article or in the citations section, this creates a backlink to your site. To benefit from your backlinks, you want your content linked to websites that are popular, trustworthy, and relevant to the content found on your website. There are several ways to acquire backlinks, including outreach, guest posting, online profiles, and organic links.
- Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves upgrading the technical aspects of a website to boost its ranking in search engines. This includes website speed, site architecture and security, schema markup, XML sitemaps, and more. The best thing you can do to improve your technical SEO is to make your website more crawlable. This means constructing a site architecture that is as easy as possible for search engines to navigate and index your web pages. Creating an XML sitemap can help search engines recognize the structure of your site, allowing them to index your content correctly.
Search engines also prefer user-friendly sites, meaning your website should be easy for people to understand and provide a good user experience. Websites with a long loading time, are not optimized for mobile devices, and aren’t secure will rank lower in search results.
Across all industries, digital marketing is essential for any successful business. Not only does it establish a strong relationship with your target audience or consumer base, but it also increases your brand’s recognizability, allowing your company to reach a wider audience. If you’re looking for a way to grow your business, start by evaluating your current digital marketing strategy to determine what’s working and what needs workshopping.
If you need help navigating the do’s and don’ts of digital marketing, BlueTickSocial is here for you. Contact us today to begin growing your brand’s online presence!
Sources:
Mastering SEO: A Step-by-Step Guide for Digital Marketers
The Importance of SEO: 10 Benefits of Search Engine Optimization
The Ultimate Guide to SEO in 2023
