Why Is SEO Important For Digital Marketing?
Search engine optimisation, also known as SEO, is the process of optimising a business’ website so it can appear on various search engines under relevant keywords. It’s one of the many aspects of digital marketing, and an important one if businesses want to be more present in the online space. Whether you’re a local start-up business or an international conglomerate, SEO for your ventures is a must to be seen by your target audience.
If you’re a beginner on how things work in SEO and why it is so important for a business’ digital marketing efforts, read below to find out.
Improves organic search under relevant keywords
Being visible in organic search is a good advantage as that is where most web traffic comes from. Furthermore, Google owns about 92.26% of the search market compared to other search engines, so it’s especially important to appear there. While you can still run paid ads on Google, your website’s organic presence through SEO means that you’re seen under relevant keywords without them. It also means that you’re appearing on the right keywords that are among the most searched within your target market.
To make sure you’re appearing organically on the right keywords, you’ll need to read a beginner’s guide on how to do keyword research for SEO first. Targeting relevant keywords is needed for an effective SEO strategy. Take into account your audience’s online behaviour and what they’re most likely to search that will naturally lead them to your website.
Besides that, remember that the elements of good keyword research are relevance, authority, and search volume. Your set of keywords must not only be relevant to your services, but your website must also be an authority that can answer the user’s needs. As for the volume, you can either target keywords that are the most searched for wider reach, or target lesser searched keywords to narrow down on the people looking for your specific services.
Increases online and offline performance for local businesses
Local SEO is beneficial for local businesses if they want to improve their visibility online. But what exactly is local SEO and why is it important?
As the name suggests, local SEO is the process of improving search rankings within the local scene. This is usually done through optimising the website with localised keywords, as well as putting the business on Google My Business and other local listings. These initiatives can do wonders for both online and offline performance of a local business.
The more present your local business is on the online space, the higher the chances for traffic and conversions on your website. Also, with 60% of searches done on mobile and half of that done locally, local SEO can even translate to better brand awareness and sales within the area. For example, if you’re a cafe in Melbourne and your website appears under the keyword “best cafe melbourne”, you’re more likely to attract the right customers – the ones with actual intent to visit a cafe in Melbourne.
Improves the user and buyer experience
SEO is also crucial in affecting the customer journey of a user when in search of a service. By appearing in all stages of the journey, they influence the decision-making process in some way.
For starters, SEO can come up as early as before the conversion happens, when people are doing research and chance upon your business through discovery and verification. SEO can also be critical during the conversion stage by providing quality website content that answers their concerns and questions. And finally, even after the conversion is done, people may still look for information on your website for after-sales concerns.
When it boils down to it, your SEO efforts should be able to answer the users’ pain points throughout all the stages by providing optimised quality content. That way, there are multiple opportunities to convince them to go for your business and services, and also to continue supporting said business.
Builds online credibility content-wise and technically
Lastly, SEO helps build credibility in two ways: in terms of the quality and relevance of the content, as well as in terms of the page and domain authority.
The Google algorithm evaluates the website content and assesses if it’s relevant to the search. This then determines where the website appears on the search pages. The more relevant the content is to the keyword, the higher it’s likely to rank. That is why all aspects of your content, from the title tags down to the body, should have relevance. Learning how to optimise title tags, meta descriptions, and website content for SEO is crucial to better rankings. This can be done by keeping your title tags brief and concise, optimising your body content without keyword stuffing, etc.
Beyond that, there’s also the page authority, which determines if a page will rank on the search results or not. The higher the score, the better the ranking. Domain authority on the other hand refers to the number of relevant backlinks in your website. The ranking of your website depends on both, and the importance of backlinks in SEO is felt in your domain and page authority score. Because a backlink is a link from a reputable website to yours, more quality backlinks are better for optimisation. A backlink tells the algorithm that your website content is high-quality enough to link to, which increases your visibility and ranking on search engines.
Reading all these may seem quite overwhelming to a beginner, but it just highlights why SEO is so important for digital marketing. That’s why it’s also important to beef up SEO initiatives to improve your business’ digital strategy for better awareness, sales, and results.
With the help of No Standing, your SEO strategy can improve vastly and help you rank better on the search results pages. Our experts know all about the basics of SEO, from general strategies to local SEO efforts for small businesses. Send us a message now and let’s get started on improving your SEO performance!
