What is SEO Search Engine Optimization and Why SEO Marketing is a Digital Marketing Strategy Game Changer
What is SEO Search Engine Optimization and Why SEO Marketing is a Digital Marketing Strategy Game Changer
The 2023 Complete Beginner's Guide for Businesses and Content Creators
Table of Contents
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Marketing?
It is imperative to increase brand awareness and drive lead generation whether you have a business website, an e-commerce store, or a blog. Most importantly, you want to bring in visitors who fit within your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and have the highest probability of converting to returning customers.
Why is SEO Important for Digital Marketing?
When potential customers search for your product or service on Google, what are the chances of seeing your website first amongst the other million websites ranking for the same search terms? How can you drive more low-cost, organic traffic to your website and win against your competitors online?
The answer is SEO – Search Engine Optimization. You can steadily expand your business website’s visibility and organic ranking by applying the appropriate SEO strategies.
How Does SEO Work?
Search engines discover websites and their content by crawling and indexing. Google sends automatic spider bots or web crawlers that index the content of webpages by systematically browsing the internet through hyperlinks. Bots decipher all the coding within these webpages to understand what the website is about.
How Google Evaluates Content and Link Quality For Search?
With AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning,) Google can accurately interpret the meaning behind the content, including written words and visuals, then stores the information in its database. In addition to the content, Google also evaluates the quality of the inbound and outbound hyperlinks associated with your website in order to assess the authority behind them.
How Google Ranks Website with Keywords?
Once the crawl is complete, Google ranks webpages by associating keywords that are determent to be relevant to the content. This data gets stored within massive data centers all around the world and are recalled when search queries are conducted.
Despite a large amount of information, all search results are returned within a fraction of a second. Users can easily filter through billions of webpages and quickly access relevant search results at their fingertips.
Why is SEO Important as Part of Businesses’ Core Digital Marketing Strategy
Today, the two dominating search engines that drive internet traffic worldwide are Google and Bing. Trillions of search queries are done every year, just counting Google alone.
When potential customers use the internet to look up information or research a product or service, search engines – especially Google, are often the primary choice for conducting online searches. So, it is crucial for businesses to have a programmatic digital marketing strategy focusing on improving visibility and brand awareness online.
SEO Improves Website Organic Search Ranking
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of gaining “organic” or natural rankings for search queries related to your website in search engines like Google and Bing. When SEO is done correctly, it ranks your webpages higher in search results that drive potential demand for your business. Best of all, SEO brings free traffic to your website, so it works effectively even with limited budget or resource.
How SEO Marketing Increases Online Visibility and Brand Awareness Through Organic Ranking
Knowing your website’s ranking in search results is important when potential customers look up keywords pertinent to your business. Semrush’s research shows that a typical visitor does not look beyond page two in most Google search queries, with the majority of the clicks transpiring on page one, positions one through ten.
How SEO Search Ranking Impacts Click-Through Rate
According to Semrush’s latest search data report, click-through rates on page one of search results can vary drastically depending on the ranking position.
Statistics on How Search Ranking Affects Click-Through Rate
For example, position one on page one of a Google search result page typically yields an average of 31.73% click-through rate. This percentage decreases respectively for positions two, three, and beyond.
Google's Average Click-Through Rate by Ranking on Page One of Search Result Page
- Position 1: 31.73%
- Position 2: 24.71%
- Position 3: 18.66%
- Position 4: 13.60%
- Position 5: 9.51%
The average click-through rate decreases significantly when comparing the highest and lowest positions on page one of a typical Google search result page. This data tells us that a high organic ranking is essential to driving more volume and lower-cost lead generation efforts for businesses online.
Semrush
Best for SEO Marketing-
Discover all the best keywords to target and bring traffic to a website through Semrush keyword research tool.
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Audit webpages and suggest ideas to improve landing page health and SEO performance.
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Optimize a website for local searches to increase local customer traffic.
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Track daily changes of keywords important to marketing.
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Find unexploited opportunities to strengthen website backlink profile.
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Uncover all the keywords and content in competitors' SEO strategies.
Why is SEO Marketing Crucial for User Experience?
In addition to improving organic rankings to gain traffic, SEO assumes the imperative role of providing the best user experience. Good SEO practice connects information to the right customers at the right time. No matter how advanced search engine technologies are, they are not as intuitive as human-to-human communication.
SEO Makes Search Intuitive
To provide a better and more seamless user experience on your website, SEO helps search engines best match keywords or phrases to the intended meaning behind the search query to the best of their ability. Ultimately, SEO plays an essential part in making search more intelligent and intuitive for users.
How to Make User Experience Seamless with SEO Marketing
Readability is also a big part of SEO that enhances user experience. Make sure to structure content on your website in an easy-to-browse format and set up a seamless user journey that guides visitors through the content the way you intend the content to be consumed.
Here are a few tips that you can implement into your search engine optimization strategy right away to quickly boost user experience.
Top 4 Tips to Quickly Boost Website SEO User Experience
- Set up jump functions with hyperlinks to help customers navigate lengthy content in sequential order.
- Provide plenty of relevant graphic elements.
- Create bold titles and section headings, such as H1, H2, H3, etc.
- Leave ample white space to give visual breaks, which makes content skimmable and digestible.
Example 1: B2C (Business-to-Consumer) SEO Strategy to Improve User Experience
For B2C (business-to-consumer) product-based or e-commerce websites, focus your SEO strategy on optimizing product descriptions, including relevant keywords, and incorporating customer reviews when appropriate.
Example 2: B2B (Business-to-Business) SEO Strategy to Improve User Experience
For B2B (business-to-business) or service-type businesses, focus your SEO strategy on highlighting comparative advantages, benefits, and customer testimonials to improve brand authority and trust.
Hubspot
Best for CRM-
All-in-one CRM (Customer Relationship Management) for sales, marketing, and customer service
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Attract leads through marketing with SEO, social media, live chat, video, and ad tracking.
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Convert visitors into leads by personalizing landing pages, building forms quickly, executing email marketing campaigns, handling marketing automation, and more.
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Translate data into strategies that move the needle with marketing analytics, slice and dice into custom objects, and bi-directional Salesforce integration.
- Free to start up with up to 2,000 marketing contacts.
- Simple to sophisticated marketing automation and orchestration scalable for any marketing team.
- A plethora of integrations with other commonly used marketing technology stacks.
- Excellent customer support from phone, email, and self-help documentation, to community support.
- Can become overwhelming for startups with a variety of different sales and marketing tools Hubspot offers. The best approach is always to start small and simple first.
- Limited flexibility and customizations for complex marketing use cases.
What Can You Achieve with SEO Marketing?
Properly implemented Search Engine Optimization strategies bring FREE traffic to your website. More importantly, SEO marketing improves the ranking of keywords related to your products and services, significantly lowering the cost of acquisition in the long run. Therefore, your website can consistently receive organic traffic through a broad category of keywords.
Examples of Effective SEO Call-To-Actions
Once you’ve created demand through organic visits, take it one step further to convert the visitors into returning customers by creating the proper call-to-action channels.
Here are three examples of effective SEO call-to-actions.
3 Effective SEO Call-to-Actions to Nurture Visitors into Customers
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