Most business owners today understand the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) for putting their product or service in front of their target audience and driving content to their website. What many struggle with is integrating their SEO strategy into their overall digital marketing strategy. Because here’s the thing: SEO might help you rank at the top of the search engine results pages, but if you are not able to target prospects at the right stage in the buyer’s process, then it will be difficult to translate this effort into actual sales.
So, in this article, we will look at the importance of connecting your SEO with your digital marketing campaign and how to do it.
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The Importance of Connecting Your SEO with Your Digital Marketing Strategy
When it comes to SEO, most business owners see it as a way to help their website rank higher on the search engine results page. Many don’t realise that SEO plays a crucial role in their overall digital marketing strategy too.
Think about it this way: when you are looking for something on Google search, do you choose the sponsored content or the organic one? One report found that the first organic result on a Google SERP has a 28.5% click-through rate. By the time you get to the tenth result, the CTR has fallen to 2.5%.
Your target audience is bombarded by ads constantly. So, when they are looking for information about a product or service, they want content that is relevant, objective, helpful, and authoritative – and, the first results of Google search convey all that. And, because SEO improves the usability of your website, that will lead to a better user experience, which can then translate into more conversions.
But, there’s more to it than just that. By bringing visitors organically, SEO can also help boost your conversion rates as people are more inclined to purchase from you if you offer them high-quality content. Even when it comes to local SEO, reports show that 88% of consumers who do a local search on their mobile device visit or call a store within a day.
How to Use SEO in Your Digital Marketing Strategy
The data is clear: SEO should be an integral part of your digital marketing efforts. The question you may ask yourself right now is: how can you use search engine optimisation to elevate your digital marketing campaign?
Here are some ideas to help you get started.
Know Who Your Target Audience Is
SEO isn’t just about getting traffic to your website but reaching out to the people who are actually interested in your content or your products and services. You need to have a good understanding of who your target audience is, what they are searching for online, what devices they are using, and where they are located. The more accurate and thorough your answers are, the higher the chances that you will attract qualified traffic to your website.
Google Analytics can help you understand who is looking at your website and see some basic information about your audience, such as their demographics, location, whether they are using a desktop or mobile devices, and so on.
Know What Your Audience Is Searching for
The way people search for information online has changed significantly in the past decade. For example, not too long ago, users didn’t trust search engines to understand complex sentences, so they used telegraphic keywords, such as “kitchen appliances Sydney.” Nowadays, we know that search engines are sophisticated enough to understand conversational questions and we are more likely to ask full sentences, such as “where can I find kitchen appliances near me?” And, this trend seems to become the norm with the advancement of voice search. Statistics show that nearly 50% of all searches are voice-activated and 20% of mobile queries are done with voice search.
What all this means is that you need to adapt your keyword research to reflect the new searching behaviours of your audience. For example, if your analytics show you that a great percentage of your audience is using a mobile device to look for information about your products or services, but your target keywords are head terms, then you need to refine your strategy. Because, here’s the thing: when running searches using their voice, your audience is more likely to use long-tail keywords rather than short ones. So, instead of “Playstation store” they would say something like “Hey Google, where can I find a Playstation store near me.”
Build Your Brand
We’ve noticed that a lot of small business owners don’t understand what SEO can do for their brand and don’t know how to use it to its full potential. They focus on its ability to generate traffic but ignore its potential for generating awareness and building their brand.
One of the major roles of SEO is to help you build your website for three factors:
- Expertise
- Authority
- Trust
These three factors are also known as E-A-T and are one of the foundations of good SEO. And, these three factors can also help you build your brand and bring more customers through your door, virtual or otherwise.
Here’s how:
- Expertise: Expertise means that the content you’ll create will show a high level of knowledge or skill in your niche. That means that if you are a bank and you are creating content about how to get a loan, your article will have more weight if it’s created by a financial expert rather than regular content marketers.
- Authority: Authority refers to the reputation your business has in your niche. Google and other search engines will look at mentions, reviews, recommendations, news articles, and other information from other sites written about your website. That’s why link building is such an important element of SEO. Backlinks tell Google that your content is relevant and a worthy source of information.
- Trust: Trust is ultimately about the legitimacy of your website. If your design is outdated, if your site’s performance affects the user experience, or if there isn’t enough contact information or details about your business, prospects won’t feel safe buying from you.
If your target audience perceives your website as trustworthy and authoritative, then these qualities transfer to your brand as well.
Make Sure Your Website Is in Tip-Top Shape
Before you can start worrying about generating traffic and conversions to your website, you need to ensure that your site will perform well once a prospect lands on it. Because, after all, it doesn’t matter how well your content is optimized and how high your site is ranking: if your website is performing poorly, visitors will bounce without taking any other action.
To avoid that, you need to check and improve your technical SEO.
In addition to making sure that your site is working well, technical SEO can also ensure that the search engines crawl, index, and interpret your site properly.
Pay attention to things like:
- Your Site Speed: The longer your site takes to load, the higher the bounce rate and the lower the chances that your rankings and conversion rates will increase. Some of the factors that might slow down your site include large media files, caching issues, too many plugins, bulky code, and so on.
- Mobile Responsiveness: With over 50% of all searches coming from mobile devices, Google will prioritise the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking. Responsive web design is paramount in improving user experience, boosting your search ranking, and advancing your digital marketing.
- Structured Data: Structured data helps Google understand better what your content is about as well as communicate what your brand and business are all about. By using structured data, you increase your chances of ranking higher in the SERPs as well as generating more clicks.
- Your Site’s Architecture: You need to ensure that the information on your site flows logically and that users will not have a difficult time finding the information they need. Because if they do, you can rest assured that they won’t waste their time trying to decipher your site but they will leave and look for something else.
Do You Need Help Connecting Your SEO to Your Digital Marketing Strategy?
While most business owners treat them this way, your SEO and digital marketing don’t exist independently from one another. In reality, they complement each other and can help you put your business in front of the right audience, build your brand, grow your customer base, and drive more sales.
But, for that to happen, you need a cohesive strategy. We can help you build one.
Australian Internet Advertising is one of the fastest-growing digital marketing agencies in Australia. We’ve helped countless businesses build successful SEO and digital marketing campaigns and grow and we can do the same for you too.
If you are not sure if SEO is necessary for your business or if we are the right fit for you, request a free 30-minutes consultation that is worth $500. We’ll talk about your business, your objectives, your plans, and help you see a clear path towards achieving SEO success. There are no strings attached to this consultation. If you are not happy with our ideas, then you can continue looking!
Contact one of our SEO experts now and let’s start growing your business.
