SEO is a critical element of digital marketing. It can not only help a business to improve its brand’s exposure, but also generate leads, drive conversions and make money for the business, while building trust and relationships with consumers. SEO is the process of improving your website and online presence, both on-page and off-page to improve its rankings in search engines.
Let’s explore how SEO can help you grow your business.
- Smart keywords, Intriguing Content
Keywords are the cornerstone of your SEO strategy. Keywords and phrases (long tail keywords which are four-plus words in length) that customers use to locate products must be religiously used in the different website features such as: Content, Web pages, URLs, Headings, Image descriptions, Metadata, Page titles etc.
Engaging content must be created in a variety of forms: Blogs, Video (which can boost organic search results by almost 50 times more than text-based content), Infographics, Podcasts, Animations, etc.
2. Bank on Social Media for Better Reach & Audience
An increasing number of consumers are turning to social media platforms to engage with brands. Almost 80% of people log in to Facebook to discover interesting content. As of now, Instagram has 26.9 million users which is double the estimated growth of other Social Media Sites. People are building their Brand by engaging users with Organic Content.
3. Local SEO, Enhanced Local Presence
Local SEO is becoming increasingly important with more consumers using mobile devices to search local stuff. People visit a nearby business after conducting a local search. So you must focus on local content (including local keywords and landing pages). SEO also encourages local users to visit the physical store after the search.
4. Optimizing On Page SEO
It is the practice of optimizing individual web pages to improve a website’s search engine rankings and earn organic traffic. It makes your site more user-friendly, makes it easier for search engines to index your pages, increases your search ranking, and helps you focus on optimizing essential elements like visuals. Some critical steps involved in On-page SEO are:
- Creating descriptive & unique title tags
- Writing descriptive and keyword-optimized alternative text for the images on your site
- Optimizing headings with keywords and relevant descriptions
- Linking site content with internal links to improve navigation and indexing
- Increasing page load speed by using Page Insights to reduce bounce rates
- Using sensible and easy-to-read URLs
- Meta descriptions for improved relevance and visibility on a search engine results page.
5. Off Page SEO
It refers to all of the activities that you and others do away from your website to raise the ranking of a page with search engines. On-page search engine optimization happens within the site, while off-page SEO happens outside the site.
Some widely used Off-Page SEO elements are:
- Backlinks:
Backlinks are also called inbound links or incoming links, created when one website links to another. The link to an external website is called a backlink. These are the heart of Off-Page SEO. Google and other major search engines consider backlinks as votes for a specific webpage. It means that the page with a higher number of votes will rank higher on the SERPs.
How to include Links?
- Blogs, videos articles pointing to your website, guest blogging etc.
- Linking your content in the comment section.
- Answering the questions in Quora and leaving the link of your website in the answer
- Anchor Text: This is a visible and clickable text (often the blue and underlined text) in the hyperlink. These links are the ones you can find in any article when they are linking to another web page.
- Non-Link related Off-Page SEO
These factors have a lot of influence on the website traffic.
- Social Media Marketing
- Guest Blogging
- Linked and Unlinked Brand mentions
- Influencer Marketing
6. Better User Experience
With relevant information, related photos or videos to support text, easy to navigate web pages or a mobile-friendly website configuration, the user gets a better website experience. This results in more clicks, more leads and higher conversion rates.
7. SEO builds Brand Credibility, Brand Awareness
Ranking first, second or third may give your customers the idea that you are one of the top players in the industry and many users have researched you, too.
The opportunity for your brand, in terms of awareness and brand equity, is limitless. Digital Marketing provides a myriad of options to explore with the aim of achieving overall organizational goals. SEO creates synergy of all marketing activities online and helps you ace the competition.
