The Importance of SEO in Digital Marketing

Search Engine Optimisation is a fundamental part of digital marketing. 

For any business, advertising is of the utmost need. When any business goes online, advertising works best to not only create brand awareness but also gain traffic to the website.  

Having a good SEO strategy implemented onto your website will allow it to rank in the first page of Search Engine Results Page. The common belief is people generally scan and review the first two pages of the SERP. Compared to online marketing, such as PPC, social media marketing, email marketing program, SEO provides fairly good ROI. 

More and more, the use of SEO is becoming important for the overall success of digital marketing. In the mid 90’s when SEO first came into the picture, manual submission, the Meta keywords tag, and keyword stuffing were all usual techniques necessary to rank well in the SERP. Then in 2004, for getting web traffic, anchor text associated link bombing, link buying from automated blog comment spam injectors, and creation of inter-linking websites took place. Then in 2011, the social media marketing and vertical search inclusion became the mainstream methods of conducting SEO.  

Today, so many new tactics and needs changed the way SEO is implemented, although the basic understanding remains the same, such as title tags, H1 tags, and everyone’s preferred subject, thanks to Google.  

Now to dive into how that works with digital advertising. 

Social Media: Social media marketing is gaining importance because of the increased usage of viral marketing approach through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Google+.  

Social media SEO refers to how social media activities can boost your website’s organic traffic through search engines. Social media is important for SEO in more than one way. It not only makes your SEO activities effective but also lucrative. The two might look different, but there’s no doubt that they help each other, and in turn, help you. 

Paid search/Google Ads: This refers to using SEO to assist you in creating ads that will work well and gain the attention you need. This includes keyword research and creating relevant copy. The market for paid search terms can be quite lucrative but with the right strategy, your ads are bound to bring in the traffic, leads and awareness your business is after.  

Keyword research and PPC forms a very important part of this section as the keywords you choose will determine where your ads appear. If you have budget behind a keyword that a lot of other businesses are bidding for – your ad will be less likely to show as the competition will be high and at the end of the day, the highest bidder wins. In times like this, looking at keywords that garner a high search volume, but a low CPC and low competition means the higher your ad will place. 

Also, display advertising, including behavioural targeting or retargeted marketing and contextual advertising use the targeted keywords generated in the organic search practices. Most of all, you all need to have a thorough idea on the marketing campaigns and business model, so that you can work in evocative ways. 

Create an SEO strategy 

To have a good digital strategy, you must have a good SEO strategy. 

Relevance, Referral and Recent 

The key to excellent search engine reputation is relevant content, that is recent and referred to by other web properties. 

When developing your website content, bear these elements in mind. Focus first on creating relevant content for your customers. You can do this by understanding your searchers intent. Understanding your searchers intent will help you develop a list of keywords where you hope to become relevant. 

A keyword can be either a single word or an entire phrase. “Shoe” is a keyword, but so is “online shoe store”. While ranking on the first page of a Google search for the query “shoe” would generate high volumes of traffic, this is a highly competitive space – and there are many different reasons why a user would search for that specific term. Conversely, ranking for the phrase “online shoe store” will send users to your website who are looking to purchase shoes online – making this an ideal keyword for an e-commerce platform. 

Because of this behaviour, keyword strategy comes down to understanding your users and their search intentions. 

  • Navigational users are people who are looking for webpages they know already exist. For example, the queries “Twitter login” and “Takealot kitchen deals” are both navigational queries. 
  • Informational users are people who are looking for insight into products or services. “Top hotels in Durban” would be an example of this. 
  • Commercial users have the intention of making a purchase and looking for the best place to do so. “Book Durban flights” and “online shoe stores” are examples of queries with commercial intent. 

Now your job is simple, create content that is relevant to the list of keywords you believe your customers will be searching. 

Once your content is created, its relevant nature should draw attention from web users who will link to it, share it on social networks and talk about it on their websites. This is the referral element coming to play. The more people link to your content, the better. Think of every link as a vote of confidence in your content and business. Google will access the relevancy of your content, and then it will look at the number of links coming to your content. The more referral and relevance the higher in the rankings you’ll be placed. 

Finally, no-one likes an out of date website, and Google feels the same. To the point that they won’t send people to websites that are out of date – why, because they are less relevant than up-to-date sites. In this case, we look to making sure we keep creating a consistent stream of great content. 

In conclusion, while SEO is an incredibly technical skillset, we can understand how to create content in a simple fashion that helps you gain traction in search engines to manage and improve your online reputation. If nothing else remember –  Relevance, Referral and Recent.  

Important factors: 

SEO is not meant to garner as much web traffic as you can to sell your items. Some geographic conditions and the customer demographics are very much important as to where and how you will get your customers. Fine tuning your target market/audience will make you confident and successful going forward. Google Analytics will help you in your investigations on these factors. 

Concentrate on mobile-friendly approaches:  

Your website should be mobile friendly and give equal access to your content through mobile and personal computers. If someone searchers for your product on a mobile phone and your site is not mobile friendly, Google will not display your site as a relevant result. One thing is clear, mobile overtakes the desktop.  

Clear website and quality content:  

A user-friendly website, clear navigation, SEO keywords, optimized Meta tags, title tags, and balanced keyword density in the qualitative, relevant, and consistent content are the main aims. Each page should be built around the keyword themes, with unique and non-plagiarised content. There should be no keyword stuffing as well as this will add to your spam score. 

Quality and relevant linking and Social media: 

You must pay attention to building quality and relevant links through which you can get a good number of web traffic. And in line with SEO, you need to set up an exhaustive and up-to-date social media platform. You should remember a good number of traffic is generated through social presence of your business 

In conclusion:  

Something you should remember – there is no static SEO solution that is going to last forever as SEO is a never-ending process and always changing. With changing online customer behaviour, search engines, too, have developed different policies. Therefore, the main task is to think about your users first, how they navigate your site, and their satisfactions at using your website; all this would directly affect the site popularity or the time they spend in each page. 

And all these considerations make SEO a great deal of work. You have to schedule daily time into your routine for the SEO attempt. You need to give it importance and optimise it properly.  

Having incorporated all these, a digital marketing strategy with balanced SEO moves will then definitely succeed. 

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