Digital Marketing marks the advent of the 21st century in advertising. It has led to the insurmountable growth of businesses worldwide using digital technology to promote a brand and its products. In this era of digitalization, it is of great importance to gain an edge over all other competitors, using modern marketing techniques. Search Engine Optimization has quickly risen to the top as the most convenient way to crack the code of digital marketing by boosting your online visibility to a whole new level. SEO, short for search engine optimization, is a major component of marketing strategy for the current generation and the foreseeable future as it plays an important role in casting your net, as wide as possible, for a global engaging audience base.
The magnitude of search volume on Google, estimated at 3.5 billion searches per day with a 10% growth per annum, is evidence enough that it is the prime place to advertise your wares. SEO as a digital marketing strategy helps search engines adopt your websites and inventory as part of their catalogue, propping up its accessibility for customers on the internet. This also plays in perfectly with the current times where the early bird gets the attention of an ever-searching generation obsessed with instant gratification. The most conveniently acquired resources are the ones chosen, due to decreasing attention spans in the internet age. This makes SEO the perfect tool to engage your customers who are engrossed in the digital space. Google ranks sites based on the content they provide for their users. That’s the reason why improving your SEO, makes your website a lot more effective when it comes to digital marketing.
Search Engine Optimization has no fixed parameters, nor any justifiable rubric. An organization’s SEO efforts constantly scrutinize and implement different strategies to integrate certain topics or keywords and keep up with the ever-morphing Google algorithms. When the audience looks for certain services on the internet through a search engine, search engine result pages (SERPs) act as the deciding factor on whether or not your company is an available choice. If you are a lower-ranked website on page 50 it is very unlikely that a customer will engage with your content.
That’s why investing in SEO is very necessary to help an unassuming audience member come across your product and be interested enough to purchase it in an oversaturated marketplace. SEO can be categorized into two different modes – On-Page Optimization to maximize the web traffic and visibility of a web page, and Off-Page Optimization involving the promotion of the web page and link building.
On-Page SEO
Also known as On-site SEO, it is the process of optimizing a page’s content, keywords, links, and tags to increase web traffic and improve visibility. It allows your website to get a higher rank on SERPs and garner the maximum percentage of eyeballs for the specific search results. Relevant, thorough, and unique content forms the heart of the operations as it helps the search engine determine whether or not your website is appropriate for a certain query. HTML and website structure form the other basic requirements of On-page SEO. Keywords used in the heading and body of the content are extensively researched to provide the perfect solutions. Here lies the high wire act of managing user-friendly language with search engine optimization as too many keywords can turn off a customer from the gist of the information. Visual assets are another very important opportunity to boost your SEO.
HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the code used to provide structure for your webpages and it highlights the relevant part of your content for web browsers. It informs search engines what your website is all about and where it should be ranked in the grand scheme of things. Title tags, Meta description tags, Heading (H1-H6) tags, Image alt text, and geotagging are a few of the HTML tags still prevalent in on-page SEO. A well-structured website accounting for site speed, responsive interface, and links to other established websites provides a rich user experience and makes sure the customers visiting your website return to it again and again.
Off-Page SEO
Also termed Off-site SEO, it encapsulates actions committed outside of your website to enhance your rankings on search result pages. It involves SEO tactics that don’t include updating or publishing content to your website. The upgrade in relevance, trustworthiness, and popularity of your site is achieved through the promotion of your page and linking by other quality websites. This is also known as a backlink which forms the basis of off-page SEO. Search engines determine the reputation and worth of the content on websites through the number of times they’ve been linked to and where from. The 3 types of link building include-
Natural Links
Manually Built Links
Self-Created Links
The links that provide the most equity or juice to a website depend on the linking site’s popularity, relevancy, recency, and anchor text used on the linking site. The other off-page SEO apart from links from external websites include social media marketing, guest blogging, linked and unlinked brand mentions, and influencer marketing, basically, any external reference that leads to engagement of potential customers.
SEO Competitor Analysis
Due to the very dynamic nature of search engine algorithms, it’s never entirely possible to luxuriate at first place. Businesses often undermine the need to look at their surroundings while honing in on their capabilities which leads to a serious case of tunnel vision. Although beneficial in some aspects, in the digital landscape this mentality leads to your competitors dissecting your advantage and learning ways to optimize their content and take over the metaphorical rat race. Competitor analysis is very important as it allows you to improve your data-driven strategies to get better results and stay ahead of all competition.
Competitor analysis, in the world of SEO, is the meticulous research of tags, links, and keywords used in the content of a competing site. It includes SEO keyword competition analysis, Competitor backlink analysis, Keyword gap analysis, and Top content analysis. It provides a basis for your research as you can see what works and what doesn’t work for your competitors and use it to your advantage.
There are different SEO competitor analysis tools to streamline these processes and collect massive data without extra effort. Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz are very efficient and effective as they form their own competitor analysis SEO reports. SEO competitor analysis thus remains a very valuable tool to remain competitive in the business space for any market.
Structured and Vertical SEO
Structured data is essential for SEO as it makes search engines understand what your content, products, your website is about. Google first needs to comprehend what your identity is before propping it up in the search results. Structured data communicates your bearings with Google which eventually helps with your site rankings. It also shows relevant information to your customer. The more specific the information, the more likely a customer will click on your site. More clicks also eventually lead to higher rankings. We’re witnessing structured data results becoming more and more pertinent as they can be used to tell Google detailed information about a page on your website which results in creative, informative, and rich results for your audiences laying the trail for long-standing and reciprocated communication.
Vertical SEO is concerned with developing high-standing positions on vertical search engines. These vertical search engines are specialty websites whose ranking systems depend on how much your product is helping them accomplish their goals. There is no definite metric with different tactics being employed for different sites, but the specialty search engines are designed to most likely showcase the websites with the best content and user experience, which also rake in the highest profit.
It can be argued that it’s more beneficial to rank well on vertical search engines than on general search pages depending on the product and services you are providing. The consumers on these sites are generally more educated and at the end of the purchasing funnel which makes their engagement very beneficial for your reputation. Optimization of vertical search engines varies from the traditional search optimization process as it is mainly concerned with your engagement on the given platform. It takes into consideration the customer’s speed of engagement with your product, mentioned keywords in the description, the number of positive reviews you receive, and whether or not your product is listed in the relevant categories.
Result Measurement
For SEO to be the driving factor of traffic to your site, there needs to be constant checks and balancing out of the methodology being applied. This is done through result measurement of the SEO. There are many ways to measure the effectiveness of your SEO strategies one of the most important of which is organic traffic to your website. This is the number of visitors your site receives after propping up on a search engine results page. It determines the quality of your site because the audience ends up on it looking for very specific solutions. It also lets you know an estimate of new subscribers or potential customers. Keyword ranking is another determining factor of your SEO results strategy. Your site’s search result ranking for a specific keyword sheds light on how far it’s been optimized. This can be done very easily through Google searches to see if your site shows up in the top 25% of the results. Click Through rate and Bounce rate are two equally determinable factors the former of which counts the number of people clicking on your website page and the latter of which shows how many of those people left without any further interactions. They are inversely proportional to your success as you need a high number of visitors who take their time and interact with your website features and explore your services and products. All these factors collectively determine a website’s authority over time.
