A brief guide to understanding the role of SEO in marketing
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of making your website rank higher on search engine results pages by designing your site and pages around the ranking factors of major search engines like Google. In the modern digital marketplace, SEO has become a core part of many businesses’ marketing strategies.
If you’re looking to meet performance goals for your organization, such as lead generation and sales revenue, an understanding of SEO marketing is absolutely essential. Here, our professional marketing experts will guide you to a better understanding of this topic.
SEO marketing is essentially unpaid advertising
An SEO strategy is built around increasing a website’s rank on the unpaid search rankings, also known as the organic rankings. This is different from the paid results of a search engine because while these prominent placements require payment, organic search results appear at the top by meeting the criteria of a search engine’s ranking algorithm.
Search engines work by continuously crawling and indexing the entire internet to take useful snapshots of the content on individual websites. When a user enters a search into the search engine, such as “How to make cookies,” the search engine will use an algorithm, basically a set of instructions, to rank which pages are best able to answer this question.
A website and content designed around these ranking factors will have increased visibility without having to utilize search placement through paid advertising.
Elements of SEO marketing
Although it’s unpaid, SEO marketing is not easy, and time and effort must be invested in developing a website that is optimized for search. However, good SEO practices overlap significantly with solid, user-friendly website design; so investing in a high-quality website is very often synonymous with one that is SEO friendly.
Here are some key elements of a website that is designed to meet your SEO marketing goals:
- A site structure that is easily crawlable by the search engines
- A stable domain that has been around for awhile
- Inbound and outbound links to and from quality sites
- Content that is well-written, readable by a general audience and relevant to users
- Pages that load quickly
- A logical and intuitive user interface
Once you have built a highly functioning site optimized for search, it is time to implement your SEO marketing strategy. This typically includes researching the keywords and phrases in your industry that are popular among your target audience and developing content to target them. It is also important to have a clear call to action for contacting your business or capturing lead information through an online form.
Experts in SEO marketing
If you’re looking for a partner in developing your SEO marketing strategy, Burg & Co. Marketing is here to help. Our digital marketing experts have the knowledge to guide your organization through every phase of developing, implementing and refining your SEO strategy.
We’d love to help you learn more. Contact us today.