Suppose, an individual establishes a business in the market and wants to build an online presence. In order to expand the business, the website is created and a blog is set up. The person managing the blog starts posting on regular basis. However, this did not help in driving in more traffic or generating leads, there were barely any visitors. Then, the owner and team start looking for solutions and they come across an unknown term Search Engine Optimization. In short, known as SEO in Digital Marketing. There could be a lot of businesses unaware of this brilliant concept. This is an important term in the digital marketing industry but still, it could be difficult to understand what is it about. Let’s understand what is SEO, its types and its benefits for the growth of your business.
What is SEO?
As we know, this term consists of three words i.e. SEARCH-ENGINE-OPTIMIZATION. We should start from the basics, the term Search refers to the action taken by people looking for an answer. Search Engine is a platform like Google where people perform the earlier-mentioned action. At last, Search Engine Optimization refers to the set of actions performed by businesses or individuals which help the search engines in connecting the search with their profiles.
It is a method of improving the quality and quantity of people i.e. increasing traffic visiting your website coming from search engines. The number of visitors is affected by your business’s visibility in search engine results. Sometimes the results that we see go up to more than 20 pages. You can understand that users barely go to pages beyond a particular number. It can be understood that it is likely that the ranking of your business is affecting the number of visitors to your site. If you want to be visible among the top results, then you must use SEO to rise among the results. It helps in increasing brand awareness, attracting local consumers and building trust and more benefits without spending the money allocated for marketing.
Before studying its types, you should know that it is based on four pillars: Keywords, Technical Elements, Content, and Backlinks. (You can read about these in detail in our blog explaining four major elements of SEO in Digital Marketing)
Types of SEO
On-Page SEO
It involves optimizing various website elements in terms of dealing with content and other technical aspects. First, you need to look for popularly searched terms related to your business profile, also known as keywords, using various sites available online. You can use generalized words related to your profile for searching like marketing, food, sports etc. After finding suitable keywords, you can incorporate them in your blog at appropriate places (avoid unnecessary overuse). You should give an interesting start to your blog in order to engage visitors. You can include images, videos or other related elements to increase credibility and engagement which would ultimately lead to more visibility to a greater audience on search engines. With proper understanding and application of On-Page Seo, you will start getting more traffic than earlier.
Off-Page SEO
After working on website elements and executing an On-Page SEO strategy, start working on the second type of SEO that would be done on elements outside your web pages. This would help in increasing business profile visibility on search engines and results in better ranking. It also helps in gaining popularity, credibility and relevance. It is achieved with backlinks, social media marketing, influencer marketing, guest blogging, and linked/unlinked mentions. All this would enable you to reach a greater audience.
This is only the beginning, with SEO you can achieve much more than you can even think of.
Benefits of SEO:
Why should we include it in our marketing strategy?
We have previously stated many benefits of it while discussing the types but there are a few more important points that make it really useful for marketers.
1. Here the search traffic is free unlike paying for ads
2. Once the ranking is high, organic traffic is regular whereas the traffic on other marketing mediums like social media gradually declines after attaining a peak.
3. There is an opportunity to reach a vast audience globally.
4. With less investment, it gives high returns by improving sales and leads.
Overall it helps in raising the value of the business in the marketplace in an easy way. Now you know why marketers are adopting SEO in Digital Marketing. Every business wants to be discovered and grow worldwide. In order to reach the said goal SEO has proven to be the best way.