Digital marketing efforts undoubtedly are an essential part of any marketing campaign. Digital marketing channels allow businesses to expand their online presence, promote their brand, products, and services to a wide range of customers, and achieve their marketing goals. When running a strategy for digital marketing, SEO should be an integral part of any marketing campaign. Search engines, such as Google Search Console, are tools that your target audience uses to find what they are looking for, and SEO is the best way to get your business online to be seen.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is a comprehensive concept with a variety of options to use. Different techniques can be used to achieve success in digital marketing.
Each method or technique has metrics, tools, and results to analyze, optimize, adjust, and achieve the best results. Each method could be a solid option, depending on your needs and targets.
Digital Marketing Techniques
The most commonly used strategies in digital marketing efforts to drive traffic are;
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The most effective method for increasing organic traffic.
- Social Media Marketing (SMM): SMM is another technique a business can use. SMM efforts can instantly increase brand awareness and build a customer community on selected social media platforms.
For example, if you are running a YouTube channel, increasing networking and buying subscribers is invaluable. With an effective SMM campaign, improving these metrics will be much easier.
- E-Mail Marketing: Digital marketing aims to gain new customers and focuses on retargeting existing or potential customers. E-mail marketing is a very effective tool for keeping in touch with customers and advertising products to the selected audience.
- Content Marketing: If you aim for a broader approach, content marketing can be another well-suited choice.
Overall, each technique has its tailored-cut area to be an effective tool. Hence, SEO efforts are necessary for any successful marketing campaign for several reasons. Understanding what SEO is and how to gain maximum benefit from this technique is an important step in digital marketing.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization, more commonly known as SEO, is a digital marketing technique that aims to optimize a web page for search engines like Google. By applying SEO techniques, web pages can achieve higher rankings in their selected niche, reaching more potential customers.
To more basically output, SEO, if applied appropriately, increases a website’s visibility against other websites for the targeted audience.
Why SEO is Important for Digital Marketing?
Wondering why ranking higher in search engines’ results is important?
Well, let’s look at the numbers to understand why it is so important. Google, the most popular and known search engine, processes approximately 99.000 search queries in a second. This number translates to 8.5 billion search queries in a day.
That is why, in digital marketing, SEO has an invaluable spot. No other platform has yet achieved these numbers. Ranking higher in search engine results pages means the browsers showcase your site to a wide range of users. More importantly, not to anyone but your selected audience.
Furthermore, SEO provides more than just the search engine crawlers finding your website. Let’s see what you can achieve with SEO.
Increasing Authority and Credibility
Having a higher place in the search engine rankings not only means more customers. It also creates a sense of authority and credibility.
Think of it this way: Would you prefer to purchase a product from a website that appeared on the first page of Google or the tenth page? Or jump into the buying process? Exactly.
Human psychology has always played an important part in marketing and is not an exception for SEO. Improving search engine rankings will increase your brand’s authority and credibility against competitors.
Increasing Organic Traffic
Organic traffic means that the interaction within your website comes from real people. Furthermore, once the SEO is completed, it is generated by itself. Unlike paid search results from ads or pay-per-click, which is also great, organic search traffic mostly comes from your SEO practices.
Users from organic search results will have a more dramatic impact than paid traffic since they search and find your website with their own intent, not led by an ad.
Improve ROI
Another objective of SEO is increasing ROI (Return on Investment). As mentioned above, SEO costs should be seen as a long-term investment. Once the SEO is established on your website, the results will be long-lasting.
Furthermore, investing in SEO will also affect the short term. A successful SEO process will increase your business’s revenue overall.
Improve User Experience and Surpass Your Competition
Search engines rely on their users. Therefore, websites that provide a good user experience to the visitors are invaluable for the search engines.
SEO is all about optimizing a website to provide an enhanced user experience. By optimizing your website according to SEO guidelines, your brand will be favored by the search engines as well.
Types of SEO: Building an SEO Strategy
The objectives of SEO are clear, as well as what are the benefits of it. It is very appetizing for any brand to increase the overall value of a business. The question that usually follows after gaining SEO knowledge is ”how to apply SEO techniques?”.
Keyword research and search intent is the first step. Understanding why (intent) and how(keywords) your targeted audience uses search engines is the first step to having SEO success.
Conducting keyword research according to your determined keyword strategy and finding the search terms that match your desires and customers’ intents is another crucial step. Remember, relevant keywords mean relevant traffic. Search engines understand what is appropriate and what is not.
These are the general but crucial first steps of SEO. Of course, there are different types of SEO and areas to apply them in different situations.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO stands for on-site SEO. This type of SEO focuses on optimizing website pages and how to improve them for a better user experience. The endgame for on-page optimization is to make the website easily show what it is about to both search engines and website visitors.
Creating high-quality and relevant content, building links, adding meta descriptions, optimizing title tags and image alt texts, and avoiding keyword stuffing are all essential elements of on-page SEO.
Avoiding mistakes such as stuffing the site pages is also as important as doing the right things. Stuffing your website with keywords will only prevent search engines from analyzing your website and being weighted as a trustworthy source.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO also refers to off-site SEO, focusing on outside of the website. Off-site SEO establishes your website as a trusted source and provider. Search engine marketing, like all other marketing methods, depends on credibility.
The best way to run an effective off-page SEO is by building and exchanging backlinks with trustworthy sources. Link-building efforts, any material from your website that appears on another trustworthy website, is the ultimate goal of this version of SEO practices.
Technical SEO
As the name points out, it focuses on the technical optimization of a website. Website speed, mobile-friendly structure, and having a sitemap are all crucial aspects of SEO. Search engine algorithms cannot find your website or do not recommend it if any of these are not compliant.
In digital marketing, SEO has also more ”business” leaded versions;
- Local SEO: Focuses on growing local businesses. It focuses on local search results and optimizing the website for these results.
- International SEO: Focuses on optimizing for a much wider audience.
- E-commerce SEO: Specifically focuses on improving an e-commerce website.
Overall, in digital marketing, SEO has an irreplaceable spot. Whether aiming for local business listings or a global target, SEO practices are essential for making your website search engine-friendly.
How do you appear in the best search engine results?
Aside from using SEO techniques, following the results and gathering data is very important. Using platforms like Google Analytics will allow you to determine what works best for your site and ease the optimization process.