SEO and Digital Marketing: Roles, Benefits and Best Practices

Nowadays, the importance of SEO has become irrefutable and every brand strives to figure out the keyword game to land at the top of search results. With 3.5 million Google searches every day, it’s safe to assume that Google SEO is extremely crucial for a company’s visibility and overall success. While the popularity of TV and magazine ads drops, digital marketing is taking its place. Although not the sole factor, SEO is an integral part of digital marketing strategy. In this article, we will focus on SEO in digital marketing and how it can benefit your business, and discuss the best practices. 

What Is the Role of SEO in Digital Marketing?

Before diving into the details, let’s define digital marketing as a strategy that utilizes the online space to promote a product, service, or business. Using videos, posts, social media ads, and banners, companies can reach out to their potential audience and grow their business. This allows brands to interact with a large number of potential customers and attract more organic traffic to their site or app. 

This is where SEO comes into play and helps companies make sure that their content reaches the target audience and appeals to it. What is SEO in digital marketing? SEO, or search engine optimization, is a set of practices to move your website higher on the results page and increase the visibility of your product or service. The main goal is to deliver an accessible and easy-to-use website with clear and informative messaging and simple navigation. If you play your cards right, the Google engine will push your content to audiences that will be interested in your services. 

Google’s algorithms constantly evolve to precisely meet searchers’ needs, which is why they tend to fluctuate and complicate planning. Many businesses utilize SEO and digital marketing tools like SemRush, Ahrefs, or Moz to closely monitor their performance and take action whenever needed. These tools provide detailed reports on how your website is ranking and who your main audience is, and even offer tips on how to drive traffic up. 

The Benefits of SEO for Business

The benefits of SEO in digital marketing are vast and address different KPIs. In this section, we will explore how you can leverage SEO to promote and grow your business and learn why SEO is important in digital marketing. 

Sales Increase

Another benefit of applying search engine optimization in digital marketing is to boost sales. By carefully selecting the appropriate keywords and generating engaging content, marketers attract the type of audience that is more likely to make a purchase. Instead of shooting at random, you will be reaching out to people who search for relevant things and look for the service you provide. This also cuts the cost of customer acquisition and increases overall sales. 

Brand Awareness 

Especially if you are new on the market, you need to get your brand name out there and draw attention to it. A good SEO tactic will help you establish your brand, tell customers about the product or service as well as about the company’s values, messages and vision and find your place on the market. It can also provide you with valuable customer feedback that you can utilize to improve the product and meet the expectations. 

Improved User Experience 

With Google’s announcement about the importance of user experience in ranking, more websites focus on making their sites more user-friendly, simple and transparent. If the engine notices that people abandon your website after a few minutes or even seconds, it will not put your link at the top of the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages). 

Catering to Mobile Users

The number of mobile phone users has long superseded the number of laptop or PC users, mostly due to their affordability and flexibility. Shifting your strategy from computer-centered to mobile is a vital step in broadening the target audience. If the mobile experience is not satisfactory for visitors, they will likely soon abandon the website and look for alternatives. Modern SEO tools also help you understand how well your website performs on a phone. 

Improved the Page Load Time

The importance of quick page load has been proven by multiple surveys and studies. About 25% of visitors will leave the webpage if it can take longer than four seconds to properly load. With these statistics, you have to make sure your website loads as quickly as possible. SEO best practices can help you realize what you are doing wrong and how to accelerate the page load to an appropriate speed. 

Types of SEO in Digital Marketing

There are three main types of search engine optimization in digital marketing: 

• On-page SEO: Optimization of individual pages to ensure higher search ranking on Google’s SERP. Includes the optimization of web content and HTML source code
• Off-page SEO: Primarily focuses on backlinks and social media and curates the content that other sources create about your website
• Technical SEO: Improvement of technical aspects of the website performance such as speed, user experience, navigation, etc. 

Using the three basic types of SEO, you can optimize different content to achieve your marketing goals. First of all, you can start with applying relevant keywords to website names and URLs which increases the ranking and makes your content more visible. Additionally, optimize the actual content and make sure it corresponds with the keywords and offers informative, well-written, and engaging text. It’s also important to make the call-to-action obvious and clear so that visitors learn what you encourage them to do right away. Meta tags are also vital for SEO strategy as they define what the web page is about before the user clicks on the link. 

To drive up organic traffic, use internal and external links. The former will help you promote other pages of your website and offer additional content whereas the latter helps you rank higher. You should also pay attention to website usability and inclusivity. Depending on your target audience, make sure your website is accessible to people with disabilities as well as to users with various devices. Finally, create an elegant and aesthetically-pleasing design that fits your brand. 

How Does Google Rank Pages?

If you are wondering how Google evaluates sites and determines which ones should rank higher and lower, this section will help you understand the basics. The process consists of four steps:

1. Crawling: Crawlers or Spiders are types of search engine software that crawl the internet and index pages. Keep in mind that images, flash movies, JavaScript, directories, and frames cannot be indexed, which is why content inside of these will not be considered by the algorithm. 
2. Indexing: As a result of crawling, Spiders store the indexed pages in a database. The pages can be retrieved with a related keyword and discovered by users. However, if your page was crawled but failed to be indexed, you need to properly optimize it. 
3. Search: Every time a certain keyword is being searched, the engine measures the relevance of all stored pages and brings up the ones that correspond with it.
4. Algorithms: Search algorithms go through keywords and URLs that are relevant, gauge answers, and push forward the pages with matching phrases and words in the title, body, tags, and URL. 

How to Create an SEO Strategy

Creating and nurturing a successful SEO strategy is a challenging task that requires SEO experience, understanding, and expertise. The strategy should also be flexible due to the ever-changing Google ranking rules. In this part, we will explore the best practices that will help you move your website to the first results page and build a coherent digital marketing outline that includes additional components alongside SEO. 

Determine the Target Audience 

SEO in digital marketing takes a selective approach and strives to reach out to a smaller number of potential customers that are most likely to purchase the product. At this point, you need to learn as much as you can about your customer, including their location, age, occupation, hobbies, preferences, etc. The more precise your target is, the higher the possibility of reaching out to the right people. 

Google Analytics is a great platform to learn about your visitors and their demographics. The tool is free to use and provides basic information regarding the posts, their popularity, and level of engagement. You can also analyze your competitors to determine where you are lacking and what you can improve. 

Identify your Semantic Core

In the abundance of SEO keywords, it’s vital to identify which are the most relevant for your audience. Search habits change, which is why marketers conduct SEO analysis before creating any new piece of content. Every once in a while, you should update your old content using new keywords to revive the old posts.

However, SEO research is not only about finding the keywords that bring the most organic traffic but also about understanding the intent behind searches. Pinning down why people are performing a particular search and what exactly they want to find is the most vital part of applying SEO in digital marketing. Knowing the intent and utilizing it on your webpage, you are more likely to persuade visitors to answer a call-to-action (CTA), whether that is filling out a form or visiting another page. A successful conversion rate—how often your users answer a CTA—positively affects the Google ranking and your sales revenue. 

Set SEO Goals 

Tracking your success is difficult without a systematic approach and predefined goals. Measure your performance in real-time using platforms like Google Analytics and set realistic and measurable goals for the upcoming period—for example, increase the number of daily visitors by 5%. After that, you can craft a clear strategy for how you will achieve this goal. 

You can start by searching the keyword you would like to be found with on Google and assessing the top results. Study the text, graphics, meta tags, videos, and other content that they have and take notes on what you can improve. Later, you can use the strategy for new content as well as change the old posts and see if the performance goes up. 

Provide Useful Content

Google also prioritizes pages that rank well in terms of user experience. This includes both design and layout as well as well-curated content. Make sure your content is educational, informative, and also entertaining and easy to read. Each page of the website should be in place and serve a specific purpose. Create seamless navigation that does not require a learning curve and allows users to swiftly identify where everything is located. 

Learn About Linking

Having a decent number of backlinks is a crucial part of search engine optimization in digital marketing. However, not so long ago, Google updated its algorithm to prevent people from acquiring links from low-quality websites. Now, it has become important to carefully select the links that are relevant to your content and that come from reputable sources. Breaking these guidelines can get you temporarily or even permanently banned on Google, which would mean the end of your site. 

At the beginning of your journey, try to focus on the quality of links over quantity and reach out to websites to ask them to collaborate with you. Many companies successfully exchange links with each other, which allows them both to grow. 

Consider Mobile Users

The mobile market is booming and more and more people visit websites on a mobile device as opposed to computers and laptops. However, your digital marketing strategy should incorporate all popular devices to make the product as accessible as possible. Another crucial aspect is to determine which type of content will be most useful on which device. 

Depending on these factors, you can choose between a responsive and an adaptive design. A responsive design dynamically adjusts the layout, navigation, and elements to the type and size of the device, whereas an adaptive design identifies that type of the device and chooses a fixed size to accommodate it.

Utilize Social Media

Social media can be used as a link-building platform as well as an off-page SEO in digital marketing campaigns. Create and maintain accounts on the most popular and relevant social media channels and use keywords as well as hashtags to attract potential clients to your site. Such platforms are also a great tool to create short and engaging posts that teach the audience about your brand. 

Conclusion 

The importance of SEO in digital marketing should not be underrated. However, the changing nature of Google algorithms can be frustrating for new and even seasoned creators. If you feel the need to tackle SEO and digital marketing but do not know where to start, get in touch with NIX United. We are a team of technical specialists with years of expertise in digital marketing. Our carefully-curated content strategy will help you increase organic traffic, extend your customer base, and boost brand awareness.