A company’s digital marketing strategy is a lot like a car. It’s a lot of different parts working together to help you get where you need to go. If you take out one part, the other parts don’t work as well (if at all) and your car is now less effective. The same goes for your digital marketing strategy.
Within your marketing strategy, you likely have things like your website, social media, content promotion, customer demographics, and more. Remove any one of these elements, and it becomes hard for your online marketing strategy to function.
One aspect of digital marketing strategies is often treated as a standalone element in SEO. Many people hire someone to do SEO for their company, or outsource this to another company, and then forget about it. However, SEO is an important part of each piece of your digital strategy and should be treated as such.
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SEO Impacts Your Website
One of the first areas that SEO plays a role in is your website. In today’s world, most people get their information online. When they have a question, rather than turning to an encyclopedia or pulling out a phone book, they type their question into a search engine. As a business, you want to be the answer to someone’s question. But just as importantly, you want that person to see your answer. This is why it’s vital that your website appears higher in search rankings.
When building a website, it’s important to keep SEO in mind. If your website isn’t built on a solid technical foundation, it will likely appear lower in search rankings. Search engines like Google take into account whether or not your website is using current best practices for websites, and how long your website takes to load. Google has been using site speed to help rank pages for years now, but unfortunately many continue to ignore it.
Your Prospects Impact Your SEO Strategy
Getting your website to the top of the search engine rankings is only part of the battle, however. Once people start seeing your website link, you’ll have to start winning them over. For example, let’s say a large number of people are clicking through to your website, but only staying for a few seconds before leaving. Search engines will notice this, and drop your website lower in the rankings as a result.
This means you need to start thinking about your prospects, and how they relate to your SEO strategy. You need to focus on things like your click-through rate, the average number of pages a user visits before leaving, and how long they stay on your website. For instance, a case study by Moz found that “The more your pages beat the expected organic CTR for a given position, the more likely you are to appear in prominent organic positions.” In essence, if your website does better than expected in terms of CTR, your site will rank higher as a result. By considering SEO, you’ll change things like how your website is displayed, how you write your content, and how you title your pages, just to name a few.
SEO is Tied to Your Content
Content plays a large role in many digital marketing strategies, going by the name of content marketing. With great content you attract more visitors to your website, give them a reason to stay on the site, and you may even get them to share the content with others. However, even if your content is providing tremendous value to users, you need to think about SEO in order to make the most use of it.
For example, you need to think about how you’re using your keywords, what links you’re including within the posts, how you’re formatting your posts, and how long the content is. Taking SEO into account when you’re producing content can turn a piece that produces a moderate amount of visitors into one that produces a large number of visitors, just with a few tweaks.
Your Promotional Efforts Impact SEO
When you have great content, you want to get it out to the world. How you do so will impact your search engine rankings, so it’s important that you pay attention to your methods. For example, the anchor text you use when posting your link plays a role in determining search engine rankings. Other factors include social media shares and the authority of the websites linking to your content. If you spam post a link to your new blog post in the comment section of an unrelated website, for instance, you could find that your search rankings drop as a result. When developing your social media marketing strategies and your content marketing strategies, you need to think about the impact it will have on your search rankings.
SEO and Your Conversion Efforts
Finally, once someone is on your website, you want them to perform a certain action – we call this converting. This could be purchasing a product, entering their email address, or contacting your office for more information. Whatever the desired action is, you want to keep it in mind when thinking about your SEO strategy.
Let’s say you run a computer repair business. When people visit your website, you want them to hire you to fix their computer. However, if your best ranking in search engines is for “How do I fix my computer myself” you likely aren’t going to convert many of those users. Or perhaps you’ve set up your website in a way that is friendly to search engines but isn’t converting well. When you try out new methods to convert visitors, you don’t want to sacrifice your SEO efforts. Think about what it is you want your visitors to do and make sure this aligns with what you’re doing to improve your search engine rankings.
Don’t Leave SEO By Itself
Just like you wouldn’t want to run your car without putting gas in it, don’t let your online marketing strategy go without consideration to SEO. SEO should not only play a role in how you market your business, but how you market your business should also play a role in your SEO efforts. The two go hand-in-hand, and you shouldn’t work on one without thinking about the other.
Frequently Asked Questions
If you’d like to learn more about the role SEO should play in your marketing strategy, please feel free to contact us at any time.
