Business success is all about visibility. And the job of marketers is to ensure that potential clients are well aware of the existence of their brands. With the explosion of digital platforms and e-commerce, it is now more important than ever for marketers to keep abreast of how technology can help them promote their brands and increase their audiences.
What is SEO?
When the modern consumer wants to learn more about a product or find a solution to their problems, they turn to search engines such as Google. Search engine robots index millions of individual web pages and add them to the search database. When a user enters keywords into the search engine, it retrieves all the pages that match the particular keywords.
With thousands of page results often matching a single term, how do search engines decide which pages to list first? They use a complicated algorithm that measures a variety of factors. These factors include—but are not limited to—META tags, URL composition, page structure, page age, keyword frequency in the content, loading speed, accessibility, and backlinks.
Search engines use these factors to determine the quality, relevance, and subsequent value of the content that exists on these pages. The more valuable the page, the higher it ranks on search engine results pages. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the field of improving these factors with the objective of increasing page ranking on search engines.
Why Understand SEO?
Even if you do not want to personally undertake SEO improvements to your brand website, there are several benefits to understanding how it works. Just like marketers should know how to dress professionally when they meet clients, understanding how SEO works enables them to put their company’s best foot forward in the eyes of search engines.
Search engine market leader Google processed 12.51 million user search queries in January 2022. According to Google’s consumer insights, 75 percent of shoppers used Google or YouTube to help them with their shopping in the past week. Hence, SEO is extremely important for brands who want to tap into this immense audience source.
SEO influences how marketers plan and craft their content. Although SEO can be extremely technical at times, engaging and interesting content also factors greatly into search engine performance. While web developers may be able to take care of the technical aspects of SEO, it will still take a marketer with a way with words to create SEO-friendly content.
SEO campaigns are not simply enhancements for the Internet. They tie into the overall brand strategy. Good SEO can help brands to establish an identity that is cohesive across online and offline channels. It will likewise enable brands to build an image of authority and trustworthiness that is beneficial in attracting and retaining customers.
Best of all, SEO provides an outstanding return on investment. Unlike certain marketing strategies that only deliver results for a short time, SEO works for your brand over months and years. Moving up just one rank in search results can improve your clickthrough rate (CTR) by over 30 percent. Over time, SEO can increase your website’s organic traffic exponentially.
How to Learn SEO
SEO is a large field and mastering it can seem daunting. To make matters worse, the industry is rife with disreputable practitioners and misleading information. However, with a bit of dedication, time, and effort, anybody can become adept at SEO. There are many ways to learn how SEO works, but the best method of learning it is to practice it.
First of all, you need to be clear about the fundamentals of SEO. There are many free resources available online that can help you to research and understand this. Make sure you source your information from authoritative websites. Any blog or business that guarantees you an instant, dramatic growth in traffic is likely to be a spam site and is not to be trusted.
Once you have a basic idea of how SEO works, try it out! You can start with a blog that is unrelated to your brand, or jump straight in and work on your business website. As you apply different SEO techniques, you will gain a better appreciation of how they can affect your search rankings. Be sure to connect your site to Google’s webmaster tools so you can analyze the data later.
Another great way to learn SEO is to enlist a marketing coach. You can enroll in personalized, one-on-one classes with an expert SEO tutor to ensure that you truly master your SEO skills. These classes are conducted online and are formulated around your learning style and business goals. Guided by your tutor, you work on your existing website and practice the full spectrum of SEO techniques.
SEO is a powerful tool for marketers who want their businesses to get ahead of the pack. Studies show that the majority of search users only click on the top five listings on a search results page. Therefore, understanding search engine optimization is crucial to achieving visibility and success in the digital marketplace. Whether you prefer to do it yourself or seek one-on-one coaching, learn SEO today and be a more effective marketer.