SEO has been a crucial part of digital marketing for years, and it keeps evolving as search engines improve their algorithms. Having a strong SEO strategy is not only important for marketers, but for any business owner who has a website, particularly those who carry all their services online.
We will discuss the importance of SEO in the context of digital marketing and why you should allocate time and other resources to it.
What Does SEO Do?
Search engine optimisation is the process of making your website’s content desirable for search engines so that they show your website on the top search engine result page.
Most people will perform online searches to find the services or products they need. But, getting to your potential customers and persuading them to choose you instead of your competitors is not easy when your brand is unknown.
As part of your digital marketing strategy, SEO can have various goals:
● Brand awareness
● Targeting your ads
● Getting on top of the competition
● Getting conversions
● Strengthening your authority as a brand in your industry.
Investing in SEO is more about time than financial resources, and a lot of that time goes on learning what SEO technique you should use for a specific goal, and how search engines work.
How Do Search Engines Prioritise Content?
To break down an SEO strategy in a simple, understandable process, you first need to be familiar with how search engines work. Search engines use a software called spiders or crawlers to index content on web pages.
As their users input certain keywords in their search queries, search engines have the job of retrieving the most useful, relevant, and high-quality content for that person. What appears nowadays in the search results is very different from what was prioritised back in the ‘90s, when SEO was born.
If, in the beginning, keyword stuffing and a large number of backlinks (obtained through white hat, grey hat, or black hat methods) were sufficient for appearing on Google’s first page, nowadays you have to give much more than that. Google and other search engines promote high-quality content that matches the search intent, pages that are amazing at providing a good user experience, and they tend to appreciate consistency.
We could say that an ideal web page for Google is a website with a history that has high-quality content, easy to navigate pages, a fast response, amazing images, and a smart way of showing all these things to the crawlers.
When using on-page and off-page SEO techniques, you are basically telling search engines what’s on your page, who to match the content with and how you compare with other pages competing for the same keywords.
What Does SEO Mean for Digital Marketing?
So, what’s the difference between SEO and Digital Marketing? As you may suspect, SEO is a subordonate of digital marketing, as the latter goes beyond search engine optimisation, and deals with a holistic approach of online branding and promotion.
Nowadays, many SEO specialists are actually offering a broader range of services than one would expect. Because SEO is so specifically connected to the quality of the content, ideas, strategy, and format of a website or an online profile, having digital marketing skills make the work of an SEO expert much more fruitful.
If SEO was a relatively simple task at its beginnings, today it is almost an art to get your website visible amongst millions of others.
Social media marketing is an example of a digital marketing application that today can’t go far without SEO. Creating shareable content is done by targeting the right audience, ranking for the right keywords, and making sure your valuable content has wings to fly. There are many website owners who can write fantastic pieces of content, only to see them ignored because of the lack of SEO efforts.
Brand authority and reputation are no longer separate from SEO techniques. To get your name known for the ideas and expertise you promote, you have to get them on the same page (literally!) with other websites in your niche, without them being necessarily your direct competitors.
There are countless other ways in which SEO intertwines with digital marketing applications, so it should be clear by now that SEO is not an investment that you should postpone.
Want to Find Out More?
As digital marketers, we at Australian Internet Advertising are genuinely passionate about how SEO has changed over the years, and what can be done today through search engine optimisation. If you need advice on SEO strategies or our SEO services, we are available for free consultations. With every client, we aim to make SEO a part of a broad, complete digital marketing plan.
