SEO is a Critical Building Block for Any Business
Search engine optimization, or SEO, refers to the process of making a website easy for search engines to find, to analyze, and to categorize. Investing in best SEO practices is an essential element of any brand’s digital marketing strategy: it makes all the difference in helping customers find a specific business among thousands of competitors.
Google now processes more than 40,000 search queries every second, translating to more than 3.5 billion searches per day. Thanks to the nature of the global economy, any business in the world can now have an online presence; every single brand must now share the market with competitors from every single corner of the globe!
As such, brands are now turning to social media marketing in droves, and investing in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is now de rigueur. What many do not realize, however, is that learning how to ensure their website ranks as high in the SERP (search engine results page) as possible can often amount to an invaluable degree of free advertising.
How SEO Works
Search engines are made up of software that crawls the internet and assesses webpage content. Here are some of the elements of a webpage that search engines take into account when deciding the order of a SERP:
– Website names and their URLs
– Page content
– Meta tags
– Link characteristics
– Usability
– Page Design
SEO and Digital Marketing
Over time, good SEO practice has come to be associated with the world of digital marketing, thanks in no small part to changing search engine algorithms.
In the past, “keyword stuffing” and “link bombing” were common SEO tactics to ensure a website reached the front page of an SERP. Today, brand reputation and credibility is more important than ever: when content is shared, commented on, tweeted or socially cited, search engines now take these interactions into account when assessing the relevance of a website.
What this means is that brand building and SEO now have a symbiotic relationship, and that ensuring a strong image and valuable content is essential for reaching new customers via search engines.
Creating an SEO Strategy
Businesses looking to boost their SERP position must take the time to form a deliberate and comprehensive SEO strategy. Here are some elements to consider when taking this approach:
1.Target market factors
Brands should focus on the geographic and demographic factors of their target audiences, and fine-tune their SEO efforts accordingly.
2.Mobile-friendly designs
More customers are turning to their mobile devices for online activities than ever before, and today’s website should be well-suited to audiences using their mobiles. Google’s Mobile-Friendlytest is an excellent tool to measure how mobile-friendly a website is.
3.Relevant linking to social media
Brands should focus on building high-quality and relevant links through which they can generate substantial web traffic. A comprehensive social media strategy is now inseparable from good SEO.
The algorithms used by search engines to sort and order their results are forever changing, but the benefits provided to brands from good SEO remain the same. Good SEO amounts to free advertising, plain and simple.
