Why SEO Matters
You know the drill, when you do a Google search yourself, you immediately click on the links on the FIRST page, and you probably don’t scroll all the way down, am I right?
Don’t you want to be the link people click on when they are searching?
People, just like you, are searching for services, products, how-to’s, and the list…goes on. The whole goal of SEO is to make your presence known. To produce quality content, gain quality leads, capture measurable results and most importantly increase your revenue.
SEO is the greatest tool in a digital marketing strategy that many companies don’t use, but it has the power to increase revenue, and build business longevity.
Marketing a personal or corporate brand is an act of projecting the expertise, skills, services, and values that are needed and wanted by your prospective customers. The truth is, the success of any brand in a growing digital world is mostly dependent on the quality of the content that is made available online.
So as a newbie or even as an expert in digital marketing, SEO is one of the vital tools required. It is the route to standing out among the rest and sharing unique-to-you content.
Now, I know – you came here to really understand what SEO is, how it works, and how implementing SEO can mean success for any type of business, especially yours, so let’s dive in a bit deepe
Why SEO Matters
In order to expand your business, you must have an established brand and an online presence. So you build a website. You may be wondering, what is a good website vs a bad website? As always, I have you covered! As you move forward with your splendidly beautiful and appealing website, there is something most businesses miss. Actually, more than half of businesses do! An SEO STRATEGY!
The point is, that our homie, lover, and friend SEO, helps you to optimize your website for different search engines and also helps to improve the experience of users visiting your website. But without the right knowledge and application, reaching your desired or target audience will become a headache and a problem.
This explains why even after posting on your blog regularly, you still are not seeing any visitors or any leads come in!
Could the omission of SEO from your digital and content marketing strategy be responsible for its failure?
Let’s find out!
What is SEO and Why is SEO Important?
The term SEO, as mentioned above, is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. It is an important digital marketing strategy that helps drive organic traffic to a website while enhancing brand reach.
With SEO, websites can be optimized through targeted keywords that existing or potential customers are searching for on the internet. This increases brand awareness by making it easier to find you online. Not to mention you are being found by the exact people that you want – darling, right?
Search engines make use of bots (also known as crawlers) to crawl your webpages and index them. SEO makes it easier for crawlers to index pages of a website correctly. The indexed pages will determine a page’s ranking in the SERP for a specific search query based on the algorithm factors. Yep, algorithms. Everything in the online world is based on algorithms. Your main objective, today, and every day should be ensuring your offerings are tirelessly connecting with the crawlers and algorithms. Are you with me?
The importance of SEO is to help do just that. A proper SEO strategy will have your website ranking organically on a search result and this my friends, is a long-term digital marketing strategy. With organic ranking, a website enjoys increased visibility and traffic, higher ranking, more click-through rates, increased dwell time, and reduced bounce rate. All things leading to money, money, money. I digress.
The Importance of SEO
For simplicity, some of the important tasks of SEO are:
- To identify what users search for and its relevance to your products and services
- To create quality content based on keyword research that will be useful to the user
- To create the right signals for search engine bots (crawlers) enabling them to analyze the content of your webpage through algorithm factors
When you build consistency with the above – oooh wee – watch out!
SEO is a complete process with several guidelines, stages, and a set of controls. In today’s competitive market. The use of best SEO practices is important to a brand or business to grant you the following.
Increase In Brand Visibility
SEO plays a vital part in building a brand online. It makes it easier for your target audience to find your brand online with the use of relevant search keywords associated with the brand’s product and services. When the quality of content is maintained and consistent, an increase in brand visibility will help to increase targeted web traffic to drive leads and sales conversions. Don’t we all love those?
Building Trust and Credibility
As of January 2022, Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. With these known statistics, websites that rank high or have top positions on search engines will get the trust of users.
When a website ranks high in the top positions in SERPs it boosts the brand’s credibility and trust among customers and potential leads. Providing quality content consistently will help build authority online, which will make the brand well-known amongst users, and you guessed it, increase quality leads and result in solid conversions.
Improved User Experience and Website Usability
Apart from enhanced visibility on search engines, good SEO practices improve the user experience and website usability. This just means, your website should be easy to navigate with specified sections, easy-to-understand content, and menu options, along with ease of access on all devices – mobile, desktop, or tablets. I cannot tell you how frustrated I get when I visit a site on mobile and most of the text is cut off the screen. Ugh – DO NOT BE THAT PERSON!
Increase in Organic Traffic
One of the benefits of using good SEO practices on a website is an increase in organic traffic. This is incredibly important in sustaining a business, especially an online business. It’s like word-of-mouth, but on the internet. Unlike paid traffic which stops at the end of a paid promotional campaign, SEO continues to drive consistent organic traffic for years to come (as long as it is maintained) to your website. When SEO techniques like relevant content, keyword optimization, business listing, and creating a diverse backlink profile are implemented, I promise, the world becomes your oyster.
A Cost-Effective Digital Marketing Strategy
When you invest in SEO for your website as a digital marketing strategy, the ROI in the long term is the sustenance of your brand’s online identity and visibility. This makes it a cost-effective technique when it comes to enhancing website traffic and SERPs ranking.
Sales and Conversions
Every business aims to generate sales of its products and services, right? Isn’t that why you are in business – to make money?! Well, I’m not sure how many more times I need to say it, but, SEO can help businesses generate sales and leads that have a shorter conversion rate. Am I speaking your language? Everyone loves a quick conversion, especially when it is your ideal customer. As more consumers search the internet to find local businesses, SEO can improve business visibility with local SEO and help drive offline sales. Really, SEO can offer whatever it is you’d like. Let your SEO expert know your goals, and it just may seem like they are able to work miracles, but please believe there is tons of work that goes into it.
The importance of SEO to a personal or corporate brand’s online presence is irreplaceable. When it comes to marketing your business in a legitimate and long-term way, it is vital to have the knowledge of how SEO works or to hire an SEO expert to develop your own personal SEO strategy!
How SEO Works
SEO is definitely filled with several steps because nothing worth having comes easy. The complete SEO process has several guidelines, stages, and a set of controls to be followed. But…when done correctly, this process can help to improve your website, boost your traffic, increase your position on search rankings, and most importantly bring in the big bucks due to you reaching your target audience! It really is a win-win.
What Are The Stages of SEO
There are three stages of SEO. On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and Technical SEO. We will tackle them all below.
What Is On-Page SEO
On-page SEO consists of elements of a website that you can control as well as the strategies that you can implement to increase your site’s ranking.
It is related to the content and how you make each content piece relevant to what users are searching for. This includes blogs, videos, infographics, webpage text, etc.
When relevant keywords are researched and strategically placed within content, search engine bots are enabled and crawl the content to find out exactly what it is all about.
It’s the small things that matter, but those small things turn into incredible results. So pay attention to title tags, meta descriptions, keyword placement, image SEO, internal links, and URLs.
What Is Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO (also known as link building) is the process of getting mentions from other websites. Getting backlinks from reputable and authoritative websites will drive traffic and trust during the ranking process. This stage typically becomes a priority after some of your keywords are already ranking. You will be surprised how many other companies will start to find you and request you to provide a backlink to their website too. Make it a trade, if you can. Just note, there are some technicalities there to consider.
What Is Technical SEO
The Technical SEO process has nothing to do with the actual content of a website or its promotion methods. Technical SEO has to do with setting configuration to make the job of search engine crawlers easier. It’s the backend of your website that needs to be considered. It’s nice to have a specialist handle these things, or hire an agency to assist.
When the technical SEO is correct, you might not have to ever deal with it again, but wrong technical SEO can negatively impact your rankings.
Once the above are correctly done, your website will be SEO friendly and be able to appear and rank on SERPs for related searches. Whoop whoop – the question is are you ready for those inbound leads though?!
SEM Meaning
SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and it involves marketing a business using paid advertisements that appear on search engine result pages (SERPs).
Although SEM consists generally of both SEO and PPC practices, the term is commonly used for paid advertising (PPC).
The way SEM works is similar to SEO and also different in terms that advertisers bid for keywords that search engine users might enter when making a query. Both processes aim in increasing visibility on search engines.
SEO helps a website get a higher ranking in organic search results while SEM involves other methods that can get search engine traffic like PAY-PER-CLICK advertising (PPC).
In a typical search engine’s result page, there are two types of results, the first one is the paid search result denoted by ‘AD’ (sometimes in a different color) which appears at the top of the page while the following results are websites that rank organically due to their SEO practices.
PPC is a marketing tool where businesses pay search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc, to show their ads in the search results. This offers advertisers the advantage to put their business ads in front of motivated customers who are ready to buy at the precise moment.
To get your ads at the top position of search engine result pages, you need to use PPC.
You can do this through the different PPC platforms made available by search engines to advertisers. Each search engine has its own PPC tool. For example, if you want your ads to have a top position on Google SERP, you will have to make use of the Google Ads tool. Just know, that spending money doesn’t have to be the first approach, but it can assist in your immediate rankings, just while your organic traffic builds.
Keyword Research is Important
Just like SEO, the use of PPC for Search Engine Marketing involves keywords. Before you can choose which keywords to use in your marketing campaign, you need to do comprehensive keyword research.
Keyword research will help you to determine the keywords that are relevant to your business and that are entered into search engines by prospective customers when searching for your products and services.
To get information on a keyword that is relevant to your business, you can take advantage of several keyword research tools available for digital marketing. Most of them are paid options with pretty costly monthly or annual fees. It definitely doesn’t hurt to have access to these yourself but knowing an SEO expert has the expertise, background, and understanding of these tools, and can help guide you through your SEO journey while you focus on other important business items.
In the meantime, if you want to learn more about SEO or you are interested in a curated SEO plan, made just for you, connect with Tamika Carlton, to at the very least, double your revenue!
Oh, and coming up with blog content is a task in itself. If you are tired of that life too, no need to stress, sign up for our blog subscription to get consistent SEO-optimized content relevant to your ideal customers!