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Here’s What You Need to Know About the Search Engine Optimization Process

The search engine optimization process is not aone-time act. Success doesn’t come overnight, so you should understand how important SEO is and how you can boost your online presence.

What is SEO and How It Works

Search engine optimization is all about making your website easy to classify, crawl and find so that it gets organic traffic from the SERPs or search engine result pages. If you want to improve your Google ranking and appear on the first page of the SERPs, you have to make changes to your content and web design.

Search engines aim to deliver high-quality results that are relevant to what people are looking for. They do this by crawling various websites to know what the site is really all about and to determine how user-friendly it is. Websites that are easy to read and navigate are rewarded with a higher ranking on the SERPs.

What is SEO in Digital Marketing?

Search engine optimization is an important part of your digital marketing strategy. You want to drive customers to your website and you can do that by making sure that your site provides exactly what they need and ranks high in the SERPs.

People usually scan the first 2 pages of the SERPs. Almost 80 to 90% of customers read online reviews before buying any product. If you want your content to be found by your target audience, you have to optimize it by using relevant phrases and keywords.

Once you have optimized your content, you don’t have to re-optimize it unless analytics data shows that re-optimizing is a must. The SEO process involves applying a set of best practices to make your content better such as linking to external or internal references and using a clearly defined keyword phrase.

You also need to write optimized meta descriptions and titles, use headers to show content subtopics and add images to support your content. Unfortunately, it’s possible to optimize the wrong kind of content. In order for SEO to be effective, you have to apply SEO to the best piece of content. It could be a blog post, video, whitepapers, newsletters, eBooks, infographics or social media posts. The SEO process can be applied to all kinds of digital media.

SEO Benefits

Quality Traffic – SEO is an inbound marketing method, which means that it’s more customer-centric than outbound marketing. It involves making valuable information easily accessible and providing helpful resources to your target audience. This can help you get more qualified leads.

PR Boost – By combining SEO and PR, you can build more links. You can get opportunities for coverage or placement on relevant sites. This way, you can distribute content much more effectively to potential customers.

Free Traffic – You don’t have to spend money on PPC ads just to drive quality traffic to your site. Once you have a website that is deemed worthy by a search engine, it will direct more people to your site and you will enjoy free traffic for months or years after publishing it.

You may need to hire an online marketing agency to create your content, but it will be mostly aone-time investment. After that, you don’t need to worry about any ongoing cost to drive traffic to your site. You may need to update your page occasionally but if you think about it, your spot in the search result is pretty much free.

SEO vs. Search Engine Marketing

Some marketers use SEO and SEMinterchangeably, but there’s a difference between these terms. Search engine marketing pertains to everything you do to get placement in the SERP.

It is an umbrella term that comprises both PPC and SEO. By knowing the difference between these terms, it will be easier for you to identify resources that use paid tactics and decide whether those resources are really worth your time and money.

How to Use Content and SEO Together

Effective and engaging content will attract visitors to your site who are much more likely to stay on your site and buy from you.

The best way to create optimized content is to choose topics that are significant to your customers and make well-written content pieces about them.

You can make how-to guides, audio recordings, tutorials, articles and other kinds of visual content to improve your web content. And of course, it’s important to create this useful content around SEO phrases and keywords that users might input when looking for services, products or answers to their questions.

Keeping your content offering fresh is essential as well. You can rewrite old posts or add new information over time.

Creating content may take resources and time, but your effort will pay off eventually. You can start by making a few blog posts and build a following on your social media accounts. Once you have followers and fans, you can start creating various kinds of media to get and retain new leads.

Get Someone to Help You

If your website is not producing the results you want, it’s time to seek help. The reason people came to your website is to find useful information and that’s what you need to give them. Search engines will also take note of how relevant your website is to the people looking for the info, so if you do content development right, it will translate into a higher ranking for your site. If you are struggling to create content that your target audience is attracted to, feel free to call us anytime. We at Sterling and Pope know how to optimize your website to create the best experience for your audience and business. We can develop a search engine optimization process that is tailored to your needs.