Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a critical concept in digital marketing. It is a process which raises a website’s rank and makes it easier to find and categorize. A website whose ranking has been modified will appear closer to the top-ranked websites when users search Bing, Yahoo, Google, and other search engines. Considering there are millions of websites, this will help customers find the website easily.
The main role of SEO is attracting customers through online platforms and one cannot be successful on the digital platform if their website does not rank high in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). There are a couple other digital marketing activities that a digital marketer must perform well to rank higher on SERP, including Pay Per Click (PPC), and Social Media Marketing.
All types of businesses including enterprises, corporate companies, small businesses, and startups need internet marketers to help them achieve their organic goals and get more traffic and in turn sales.
SEO and Internet Marketing
It seems there is no big difference between SEO and digital marketing approaches; both possess the same skills and execute the same functions.
A SEO consultant is specializes in bringing organic hits, while a Digital Marketing consultant aims at the whole online existence of a business that is way past SEO. Practically, a SEO person has to look after other areas of digital marketing. Some marketing experts call a SEO integrated digital marketing.
How SEO works
Basically, Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines are text-driven and use algorithms to get search results. It is quite complex and includes several factors:
* Website Content
* Keyword Density
* Meta Tags
* Usability and Accessibility
* Characteristics of Link
* Website Names and URLs
* Inbound Links
The SEO Cycle
1. Crawling
Search engines run software known as “Crawler” or “Spider” that crawls over website content systematically. Google’s software is named Googlebot. The crawler doesn’t visit a web page at specified time intervals; it may visit every day, after a week or even after months. The most important thing worth remembering is what and all a search engine can crawl, for instance, it can’t crawl password protected pages, images, and JavaScript. Once the web crawler visits a page, it stores them for the search engine to process later.
2. Indexing
The crawler stores all indexed pages in a database that consists the websites’ information that the search engine can use to browse. To access the web pages from the database one must use relevant keyword or search strings. To find a website not stored in the database, one has to optimize the page the right way.
3. Algorithms
Each search engine has unique Search Engine Algorithms. An algorithm is a formula or set of rules used to define how important a web page is. Another important use of algorithms is determining if a website of spam or genuine and if it contains important content for users so it appears in Search Engine Page Results.
There are three main types of algorithms:
* Whole-site Algorithm
* On-site Algorithm
* Off-site Algorithm
4. Extraction
Because the search engines consider a user’s search request, it compares the keywords with the pages indexed or stored in the database. There are millions and possibly billions of pages with identical key phrases, therefore, the search engine measures how relevant the pages are. This is a complex process but basically, the search engine obtains a list of existing documents that have a group of keywords.
The entire process makes a web page visible in the Search Engine Result Page.
Important SEO Collaborations for Digital Marketers
One of the latest trends by performance and digital marketing teams is including SEO tactics in their digital strategy. We have briefly discussed below how SEO approach collaborates with other disciplines.
1. Conversion
An easy way to lift up organic results is combining conversion tactics and SEO. It’s important to match the best user experience (UX) with the right content journey, as this will bring satisfied users to the funnel. For this, to work, there is need to understand users, read heat maps, and test the UI occasionally.
2. Website Developers
SEO has to work with website developers, optimizing for mobile first, speed, knowledge sharing, and technical audits, because JS is here to stay. It’s absolutely necessary to embrace new technologies and learn way of embracing them.
3. Paid Search
By using content strategy and SEO a digital marketer can minimize use of expensive keywords and gain organic traffic. But to get the best results, SEO teams should work with paid search teams by optimizing mutual content strategy, landing pages, and keyword plans. To break every challenge the SEO teams and paid search teams should brainstorm together.
4. Social Media Marketing
By having a social media program that integrates properly with SEO strategy, digital markets are able to achieve more SEO benefits. Social shares tend to bring natural backlinks to the site or content and can help to know whether the content strategy in place is working.
5. Brand Mention and PR
SEO strategy also requires online reputation management (ORM). By collaborating with SEO, PR teams get many benefits, as brand mentions can leverage search visibility and online presence.
6. Content Strategy
Content is the most important element in SEO. In most cases, the SEO budget great relies on content creation. It is important to define a strong content strategy along with SEO as this easily lifts brand authority and conversions.
SEO is very important in digital marketing and without it, digital marketing fails or becomes ineffective. It’s exclusively devoted to giving web pages a higher search engine ranking position and channeling more traffic to the page which eventually results in more sales.
But, the strategy needs to be changed with changes in search engines. For instance, Google is consistently updating its search engine. Because SEO is not all about link building, keywords, and creating content, additional SEO implementations are needed to compete with search engine updates.SEO professionals and digital marketers should keep updating with every new change in SEO, digital marketing, search engine, and ranking strategies. Also, SEO professionals should team up and learn from other niches to get new strategies that will give the best results.
