What is SEO Marketing?
SEO marketing doesn’t need to be as complicated as it sounds. As users, we rely on SEO marketing on a daily basis. Think about the last time you needed to find a local coffee shop or needed an answer to a question. You most likely opened up your browser and typed in ‘coffee shop near me’, or ‘best coffee shop in X’. Within a few moments, you’d find the answer to what you were searching for on the first page of Google, not on page 3.
This is basically SEO marketing. It is an amalgamation of using data and creativity to bolster your website so that search engines bring up your business at the top of a results page when users are searching for the products or services you offer.
How Do Search Engines Actually Work?
First thing’s first, however; we need to have a good enough understanding of search engines and the Google gods and how they actually work in SEO marketing. Google, for example, is a mammoth of a digital library that updates itself every second. So, it’s no wonder that it can’t discover and crawl every single website out there straight away. Making sure your website is discoverable by search engines will mean that they need to be able to do the following things:
Crawling: Digital bots are sent out by search engines to scan the internet to be able to hop from link to link, reading texts, looking at the code and discovering new or updated pages.
Indexing: Once they’re able to find a page, they send the information back to the search engine’s massive database, known as an index. This is like filing the webpage away under the correct category in the digital library.
Ranking: Google will bring up the most relevant content for whichever query users are searching for. It will give the content a score depending on how authoritative and relevant it is. So, the more relevant and high-quality your content is, the more chance it has of ranking highly on the SERP.
The 3 Pillars of SEO Marketing
Okay, so this is a lot of information to digest, so let’s pivot and talk about the three most important pillars of SEO marketing. These are the pillars that lay the foundation of your digital footprint. They will make sure that search engines index your site correctly and rank it highly.
On-page SEO is all about perfecting your content
This is the bread and butter of your SEO marketing strategy. The content you put out there needs to be targeting the queries users are searching for as this all helps your on-page SEO. So always make sure that you create authentic content.
For example, this article is targeting the keyword ‘SEO marketing’, so I’ve added it organically within the content and in the title so that when you searched ‘what is SEO marketing’, this article came up.
Off-page SEO is all about earning digital street cred
Off-page SEO takes care of your website’s rep. If your off-page SEO is sound, search engines will view your website as trustworthy and reliable. One of the easiest ways to do this is through earning backlinks to your website. This happens when another website links back to yours (like a vote of confidence from the other website), adding more authority to your website.
Technical SEO keeps the engine running
Having bang-on content is one thing, but if your website takes its sweet time to load on a mobile phone, users will drop you like a hot potato. The technical side of things makes sure that bots can crawl and index your site smoothly. This can include maximising your website’s loading speed, maintaining a secure connection and making sure that your design is responsive on mobile devices.
Why Does SEO Marketing Matter for Your Business?
While PPC delivers instant results, organic search is more of a long-term commitment, but the results are unmatched. Here’s why you need SEO marketing for your business:
Cost-effective traffic: The moment you stop putting money into a paid ads campaign, your traffic will drop to zero. Organic traffic is free and a lot more reliable.
Builds trust and credibility: When you rank well on SERPS, users know that they can trust your opinions and content and that you’ve done your time to be able to get there.
Long-term sustainability: Having a well-optimised blog post can continue to bring in new visitors to your website after you hit publish for years to come.
Better overall user experience: Having a technically sound website that loads faster and has an easy-to-use navigation benefits both your users and search engines
How to Start SEO Marketing Today
We’ve discussed a lot and I’ve thrown a lot of jargon in here, but you don’t have to panic. Here are three easy steps you can take to begin SEO marketing for your website today:
Brainstorm your keywords: Do some research into what users are asking for within your niche/industry. Use these queries in your content to optimise your website.
Create helpful content: Write content and create landing pages that answer those questions and always make sure your content is useful to users.
Audit your mobile experience: Pull out your phone and browse your own website. Is the text easy to read? Do the buttons work? If you struggle to navigate it, your users (and Google) will too.
In essence, SEO marketing is about providing the best possible value to your audience, answering their questions by creating useful content and about remembering that it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Are you looking for a stellar SEO marketing strategy for your brand and website? Reach out to me for more information on how we can get started today!
