The World Wide Web has become a beautiful, highly diverse place where everyone gets a chance to present their ideas and connect with the right audiences. Precisely because of that, it keeps expanding at an astounding rate. However, with your competition that is constantly growing, boosting brand awareness and online visibility has become more challenging than ever.
As most of your customers don’t scroll past the first page of Google, just being online is not enough anymore. To get yourself noticed, you need to work on your rankings and exposure. And, that’s where search engine optimization shines.
Here is how to integrate SEO with your digital marketing strategy.
Create quality content to give your website authority.
Today, everyone’s talking about the importance of driving quality traffic to a website. However, when observed in an isolation, traffic is purposeless. Tim Soulo defines it as a vanity metric. Your goal is to turn your website visitors into leads and paying customers. For example, did you know that your visitors spend then less two minutes on your site? To get them to take the desired action and stay on your site longer, you need to engage them. And, this is where your blog steps in.
Creating quality content not only boosts your visibility and rankings in Google’s SERPs, but also gives you the opportunity to position yourself as a trustworthy source of information. By publishing industry-specific and insightful blog posts that resonate with your target audience, you will inspire people to come back to your blog for more awesome information. Additionally, once they see the value you bring to them, your target audience will start liking, sharing, and commenting on your posts extensively, boosting your brand awareness and exposure in the overcrowded online sphere.
When creating a content marketing strategy, keep track of your readers’ preferences and industry trends. For example, producing brief, 700-word blog posts doesn’t work anymore. Studies show that long-form content performs better on Google. Also, there are other, more engaging forms of content you could try out, including infographics, original research, case studies, podcasts, and branded videos.
Optimize the critical elements of your site.
SEO is a layered aspect of digital marketing and you need to approach it strategically. The recent SEO guide by a Hong Kong-based SEO agency, Elevate Digital, lists the most important elements of your site you need to optimize for search engines, including:
- Creating a responsive and visually appealing site.
- On-page optimization, which basically means polishing up your website pages individually. This includes, for example, optimizing your meta descriptions, title tags, URLs, and images for your major keywords.
- Optimizing content for popular keywords to boost your visibility on Google, but make sure they’re relevant and added naturally. Also, take advantage of internal linking to make your content easily findable and indexable.
- Local SEO that allows you to put yourself in front of the right customers. These practices include updating your company name, address, phone number, customer reviews, etc.
- Link building helps you boost your backlink portfolio, exposure in the SERPs, and brand authority.
- Reputation management is all about monitoring what your target audience is talking about you online. To boost user experience, create FAQ pages, case studies, informative blog posts, and testimonials that will let them find the information they need faster.
Keep pace with the latest digital marketing trends.
The digital marketing landscape is evolving at an astounding rate, And, if you don’t keep pace with these changes, you’ll find yourself lagging behind your competition. Let’s take an example of keyword research. In the past, optimizing your content by adding a bunch of exact match anchors and links to your homepage worked. However, with the rise of voice search, you should focus on optimizing for conversational phrases that mimic real-life conversation. That’s a huge leap towards improving user experience, you must admit. Not to mention website responsiveness that has become a standard over the past few years, especially after Google’s introduction of mobile-first indexing. Building a data-driven marketing strategy and tailoring it to Google’s updates will give you a great competitive advantage in the SERPs and, ultimately, improve your bottom line.
Invest in the right tools and measure your site’s performance.
To get the most of your SEO strategy, you need to know what tactics work for you. This is why you need to set clear goals and keep track of your major SEO KPIs continuously. For example, you need to measure your keywords, website speed metrics, user behavior metrics like bounce rates, error rates or conversion rates, as well as your major traffic sources and ROI.
Fortunately, you don’t have to do that manually. There are numerous amazing SEO tools that can speed up the repetitive analytics processes for you, identify the weaknesses in your strategy, increase your productivity, and boost the overall work quality. Of course, the choice of the right set of tools depends on your SEO goals and the metrics you want to track. For example, Google Analytics gives you an invaluable insight into who your audience is and where your site visits come from, while Screaming Frog SEO conducts invaluable on-site audits. Respona is offers a great free tool for checking backlinks and building your backlink portfolio.
Sure, keep in mind that just investing in a fancy tool is not enough to boost your SEO. Your strategy, experience, and knowledge do. That’s why you need to constantly improve your knowledge, learn how to get the most out of your digital marketing tools, and take immediate steps to solve problems.
Be patient.
Always remember that a solid online presence isn’t built in a day. It takes time to build your online reputation, earn people’s trust, and win Google over. To maximize your success in the long-run, do your research, build a killer website that aligns with your branding goals, implement the SEO strategies mentioned above and test them continuously, and use the data you’ve gathered to improve your digital marketing campaigns.
