You’ve probably lost count of how often you’ve heard that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial part of your digital marketing efforts. It can improve business visibility on search engines and drive visits to your website.
The fact is SEO, when done right, can prove transformational. It lets you position your business, appeal directly to your target audience, and vastly improve the amount of organic traffic you receive without you having to pay for every click.
Research indicates that 68% of all online experiences begin with a search engine. Over half of all website traffic comes from organic searches, and some 60% of marketers consider inbound marketing their best source of leads.
Investing in SEO can pay long-term dividends for your brand. What’s important to remember, though, is that it can be quite a technical skill. SEO consists of multiple elements that work together to deliver the search ranking you’re looking for.
Read on to discover the constituent elements of SEO and strategies for getting the most out of them:
1. Keywords
It’s hard to overstate the importance of keyword strategy. Ideally, your digital marketing agency should make it the foundation of your SEO efforts, influencing all downstream steps, such as content strategy, link-building, and even your paid campaigns.
The keywords you integrate into your web content tell Google which terms you want to rank for. For instance, if you’re a consumer electronics retailer, you could rank for anything from “Affordable kitchen appliances” to “Premium kitchen appliances” or “Modular kitchen appliances.”
Essentially, you’re positioning your business by choosing which keywords you target. It’s usually a lot harder for a web page to rank for multiple keyword phrases, so you must choose. And just as with other marketing skills, keyword strategy results from good technical and research skills combined with a basic understanding of human psychology.
Put yourself in your customer's shoes and think about what they might search for. Using keywords to describe your product is fine, but if your offering is complex or new to the market, they might not know how to describe your product — just their need.
Generally, you want to aim for 1% keyword density on a web page. That’s around one instance of a keyword every hundred words or so. This should reliably inform a search engine what that webpage is all about.
2. Unique Content
Content is crucial because it’s the vehicle for your keywords and how you engage with your audience.
Once you have your keywords and campaign strategy in place, use that to establish your content buckets. These are defined categories of topics you’ll want to write about. Once you know your content buckets, you can use those to churn out relevant, optimized content for your audience periodically.
With SEO-optimized content, the belief is often the more, the better. While that’s not entirely untrue, it doesn’t mean you must regularly churn out 2000-word blog posts or super-long web pages. User experience is just as important. Not only does it affect your readers’ on-page behavior, but it can also affect your ranking if people tend to bounce off your website frequently.
Consider establishing a decent blog publishing frequency — say once a week. This will give you the volume of content you need to get picked up by the search algorithm and give you more chances to integrate keywords.
Above all, ensure your content is unique. There are few quicker ways to see your ranking and domain authority nosedive than to have plagiarized content on your website.
Finally, keep updating your content. Regularly updated content indicates to Google that your site is much more relevant and worthy of ranking higher. Audit your content on a fixed schedule, say once a quarter or so, to refresh dated information and embed newer keywords.
3. Interlinking
Interlinking is the practice of including links on your on-domain content to other web pages on your site. Doing this helps to reduce your bounce rate and helps Google better understand your brand and niche.
The anchor text — the hyperlink's keyword — plays an important role. It describes the page it’s linking to for Google and helps improve your ranking for that keyword.
Consider prioritizing internal links above the fold (i.e., the part of the page visible before scrolling). This helps SEO in several ways, including guiding search crawlers through the website and directing consumers to relevant products, improving conversion rates.
4. Metadata and Alt Tags
Metadata is a textual content that describes the information on your page. It’s inserted in HTML tags for each web page at the backend. Crafting good metadata embedded with relevant keywords for the page is an excellent way to help your search ranking.
The title tag is the most important type of metadata. It shows up as the page title on your browser window and in search results.
The meta description is a brief body of text that the search engine may display on a search results page. It’s a way to entice viewers to click on that link and visit your web page.
Finally, use alt tags to describe the media you upload on a page, including images and videos. It’s another opportunity to include keywords but it is also vital for text-only browsers and visually-challenged people who may use screen readers.
5. Videos
This might seem like a left-field suggestion if you’ve only ever thought of SEO in terms of textual content and keywords. However, there are a few different ways embedding videos can help improve the ranking of your web pages.
First, users tend to prefer videos to text. Including videos improves engagement time, which is an important ranking factor.
They can also help you condense lots of information into a short video instead of having large blocks of text on the screen. Finally, product and corporate videos offer branding opportunities, enabling viewers to relate to the company and offering.
In summary, while SEO can feel like a lot of work, it’s a reliable method of attracting traffic. With time and consistency, SEO efforts pay off and improve your ranking for your chosen keywords. It’s also a more cost-effective method of attracting prospects in the long term, given that you’re not running paid ads, and the quality of leads you get tends to be better.