What Is SEO and How it Works

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• The Definition of SEO
• Why SEO Matters for Businesses
• How SEO Fits Within a Marketing Strategy
• When Do You Start Seeing SEO Results?

Creating web content with SEO in mind should be at the center of every marketing strategy. By optimizing your pages for search, you can get more website traffic and reach your target audience. The key to using SEO is providing valuable content for users. Learn how SEO fits into your marketing efforts.

The Definition of SEO

SEO is short for search engine optimization. It is the ongoing process of producing a wide array of high-quality content in order to reach more users through search. The idea is that by incorporating relevant keywords and writing interesting content, you can rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) and get more clicks. Likewise, strategies like using meta tags, title tags, and headers can make your pages rank more favorably.

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Why SEO Matters for Businesses

SEO is a crucial part of growing your business. In order to get more people to visit your website, you need to make sure you’re visible on search engines. Brands without a strong web presence come off as outdated or untrustworthy. Here are a few key reasons businesses should care about SEO:

• Establishes credibility — A major part of SEO is creating quality content that people want to read. By writing about topics within your industry, users can begin to see that your brand is knowledgeable about the products and services you provide. By becoming a thought leader, people are more likely to continue to read and engage with your content, which can drive sales.
• Drives web traffic — The more you follow SEO best practices, the better your webpages should rank on SERPs. The higher up you are on a SERP, the more likely someone is to click on your page. Just think about it: When searching something, you don’t go to the fifth page of Google; you typically click on the first couple of results. Having your brand come up on the first page of Google’s web search makes you look more legitimate and will win you more clicks.
• Good SEO equals a good user experience — Along with providing quality content, structuring your pages correctly, maintaining fast loading speeds, and keeping your pages free of bugs can all improve your SEO. This leads to better user experience, which is more important than ever. In fact, many companies are investing more in user experience than advertising. In its first year, Amazon invested in UX 100 times more than advertising.
• Keeps your brand current — As digital marketing becomes increasingly saturated, brands need to find ways to keep up. Since SEO is always evolving, incorporating it into your marketing efforts forces you to stay up to date on the best practices. SEO also entices your marketing team to continuously come up with original content. This shows consumers that your team is very much active and always thinking of the next thing. By staying on top of popular topics and trending keywords, you can show that your brand is modern.
• It’s easy to quantify — Unlike some other marketing strategies, SEO is quite easy to quantify. By using SEO tracking tools and web analytics, you can learn exactly how your efforts are impacting your brand. Look at how much your website traffic increases once you start putting effort into your SEO. Also, look at how your leads and sales increase over time.

How SEO Fits Within a Marketing Strategy

If your marketing strategy hasn’t turned to search yet, it’s about time you started. Although creating social media, email, and PPC campaigns are all key components of any digital marketing strategy, organic search is becoming increasingly important. That’s because people are constantly turning to search to find out new information.

How does this fit in with marketing? Well, by creating quality content, such as blogs, you can drive more organic search to your website. Along with using blogs to improve your SEO, they are a great thing to share on your other digital marketing channels. For instance, you could link to a blog you wrote in a social media post or include it in your weekly newsletter. As more people visit your links, this also improves your SEO. As you can see, all of these different components are intertwined and become your overarching strategy.

When Do You Start Seeing SEO Results?

Truthfully, it’s hard to say. Improving your SEO is an ongoing process. It’s not simply a matter of writing a few keyword-rich blogs and calling it a day. Rather, you need to continue to produce quality content, optimize your webpage structure, and search for relevant keywords.

As you continue to follow SEO best practices, you should begin to see a steady stream of website traffic. When choosing the right topics to write about, you could even get a sudden influx of traffic if the timing is right. The key is consistency. Even if you feel like it’s taking a while to rank higher, you’re still improving your website and user experience in the meantime.

Providing quality content shows your customers and target audience that you are a trustworthy source of information. This, in turn, can improve your brand’s reputation. Through this ongoing process, you can begin to look at the numbers and see if your efforts are worth it. Likewise, it may be useful to collect qualitative data about the content you are sharing, whether that be through a comment section or a customer survey.

By creating web content with SEO in mind, you can reach a wider array of users. The more people who visit your website, the more eyeballs you get on your products and services. Using organic search to grow your business is a must in the era of Google.

Knowledge Base: SEO