What is SEO and why is it essential in Digital Marketing efforts?

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Hello there!

In this article, I am going to discuss what is SEO and why it is so important in digital marketing. I will also mention SEO best practices, and where to keep learning more about SEO. Finally, I will go over the most popular SEO tools, and I will wrap up with final comments regarding Search Engine Optimization.

What is SEO?

According to Moz.com, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.

To understand the true meaning of SEO, let's break that definition down and look at the parts: 

• Quality of traffic.

You want to attract visitors who are genuinely interested in the products that you offer. 

• Quantity of traffic.

Once you have the right people clicking-through from those search engine results pages (SERPs), more traffic is better. 

• Organic results. 

Organic traffic is any traffic that you don't have to pay for.

SEO is then, the optimizations we do, in order to increase the quality, and then the quantity, of organic traffic to our website, or to any other owned content like landing and social pages. 

Those optimizations allow search engines to retrieve our content, and make it available in the first options of their SERPs. Then, when internet users type certain keywords, our website or content will show up among the suggested websites.

Simply put, SEO is optimizing our website so search engines, like google and bing, expose our brand and products on the first result of their search engine pages.

The Must-Know SEO basics

To start, I highly recommend getting familiar with the most frequent SEO terms. 

This post by #HubSpot is a good place to learn them.

As I mentioned before, SEO is also known as organic search; one of the digital marketing channels. Our goal with SEO is to increase organic exposure, of relevant and quality content from our brand, to potential leads, prospects, and customers through search engines. SEO or organic search must be seen as one of the primary digital channels to achieve our marketing plan goals.

Let's use Jenny's example to understand SEO basics:

For many years Jenny has been selling homemade cookies upon request. 

In Twyckenham hills; her neighbourhood, people love Jenny's cookies, and Jenny loves baking them.

She has been thinking about creating a website to increase the reach of her cookies. Jenny also plans to add online payment options, as well as delivery service for her city; South Bend.  One of her challenges is that Jenny has no savings to invest in paid advertising, which is why Freddy; a digital marketer and also Jenny's best friend, offered his support to help Jenny with SEO.

Here is what Freddy suggested in their first meeting at Zen Cafe; Jenny's favourite meeting place:

• Make sure to know your business plan. If you don't have one, begin creating it.
• Make sure you know your digital marketing plan; which must be aligned with your business plan.
• Create content having your digital marketing goals in mind.

Zen Cafe, South Bend

While Jenny was working in content creation, Freddy decided to work on creating a website with Wordpress; a popular CMS available for free.

During their second meeting, a cold winter afternoon in Freddy's house, they overviewed their progress.

 

Jenny had taken many pictures of her variety of cookies, the facilities, the process, packaging and even some pictures of her customers enjoying her favourite cookies; Gingersnaps.

Jenny's Gingersnaps

 

On the other hand, Freddy explained to Jenny the basics of creating a well-structured website. Among the terms discussed were; bots or spiders, indexing, sitemaps, structure, UX, mobile-friendly, SEO oriented and CTA's.

 

As a consequence of her second meeting with Freddy, Jenny understood the general implications of SEO and its importance. She promised to Freddy that for the next week, she will bring a sheet with all the relevant keywords for her new online business idea. Freddy suggested Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, SEMrush Keyword Research and Moz Keyword Explorer as popular tools that help you with your keyword planning research.

Freddy meanwhile promised that he will come up with a list of the best domain names and hosting companies. He will also do research, to find out what are the best theme options for Jenny's Wordpress CMS.

For their third meeting, Jenny and Freddy met at  Zen Cafe. Here is what Jenny and Freddy did:

• Jenny made a Digital Marketing plan and established goals.
• They decided to direct their digital marketing efforts through 3 digital marketing channels; SEO, Social Networks (they chose Facebook and YouTube) and email marketing.
• The installed wordpress.org CMS and chose the Divi theme. 
• They chose a domain name aligned with the Digital Marketing plan.
• For hosting, they had chosen 3 options; WP Engine, SiteGround and BlueHost. Finally they though BlueHost provided the best price-quality relationship.
• Jenny and Freddy designed a hierarchical model for their site structure.

 

The process of creating a site structure forces a designer to think about how visitors will navigate through a website. 

At the end of this 4 hours morning meeting at Zen Cafe, Freddy asked Jenny to work on creating digital content in the form of text, images and video for the 3 chosen digital channels (Website, Facebook & YouTube, and Email automation). Freddy had to go home, so Jenny agreed and promised to send Freddy a Google Drive link with all the fresh content for him to review it. 

 

At the same time, Freddy promised to do extra research on SEO website improvements; schema generators, XML sitemap generators, robots.txt file, CDN, and to go over SEO and content optimization tools.

 

Eventually, Freddy and Jenny had their last "free" long business meeting, on a sunny Monday afternoon, at Jenny's house.

 

From this point on, Freddy would only help occasionally, since he was busy with new projects at his work, plus he was gaining more skills learning digital marketing with Alberto.

At this final meeting, Jenny and Freddy spent half a day, "feeding content" to Jenny's brand new website.

All content was already written and grammatically revised, making sure keywords were included in the copy, according to SEO best practices; alt text and title tag for images, as well as in the heading tags.

• Freddy had opened Facebook and YouTube accounts with the logo, slogan and business citation. He had added keywords in the descriptions of Jenny's cookies and organized the social profile structures.
• Jenny also worked on adding content to these social networks, as well as designing an opt-in form to collect data in order to create the first drip marketing campaign.

 With Jenny and Freddy example, I hope to have mentioned and even explained some of the SEO basic must-knows. There are plenty of links to different articles where you can obtain additional information to increase your SEO knowledge. SEO is a big chapter in digital marketing, which is why I didn't expect to cover all the material in this single article, but rather to introduce the topic and suggest useful links from current digital marketing authorities.

Where do I apply SEO?

As we discussed, SEO consists of optimizing content and applying several techniques to appear in the SERP's of search engines. You can use SEO for your website, your blog and even your social media accounts. SEO can be free but it is time-consuming, even when recurring to content curation.

Keep in mind that Search Engine Optimization can be applied on-site and off-site:

On-Site SEO

According to SEMrush, On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing content and HTML source code to clearly define what your webpage is and what information it is providing. Some areas that need to be optimized include:

• Titles
• URL 
• Meta Descriptions
• Keywords and Semantically Related Words 
• H1...H3 
• Video Content 
• Images 
• Content length 
• Readability 
• Internal Linking 
• Social Sharing Buttons 
• Duplicate Content 
• Crawlability 
• Page Loading Speed 
• Mobile-Friendliness 
• Markups

I encourage you to do research on the above-mentioned topics to understand the different levels of SEO. Eventually, I hope to address these and more SEO topics in my next blog posts.

Off-Site SEO

According to Moz.com, "Off-page SEO" (also called "off-site SEO") refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs).

Building backlinks is at the heart of off-page SEO. There are three main types of links, defined by how they were earned; natural links, manually built links, or self-created links.

In their post, Moz writer continues to say, "almost any activity that a) occurs outside of your own website and b) helps to improve your search ranking position could be thought of as "off-page SEO." These include things like: 

• Social media marketing 
• Guest blogging
• Linked and unlinked brand mentions 
• Influencer marketing

Where do I learn more about SEO?

For starters, I highly recommend clicking the links I have provided in this article. I suggest this because every link provided is within a context that will help you to better understand, not to mention that those linked articles were built with high-quality content.

Additionally, please make sure to follow me; Learn Digital Marketing With Alberto, I will keep on posting not only fundamental concepts to digital marketing but also the newest tools and trends that you should be aware of.

Tip: Make sure to explore more related content from the already provided links. For example, if I mentioned On-page SEO, you'll notice that SEMrush has a blog that covers many other related articles.

Popular tools for SEO

Following there is a table with some of the most popular SEO tools you should be familiar with.

I recommend to explore and understand at least the basics of these tools before you decide to pick one. In fact, most probably, you will need a combination of tools per category since not all tools offer the same features.

Popular SEO tools

Wrapping Up

SEO is fundamental to Digital Marketing. In this article, we learned what is SEO, and why it is so important in digital marketing.  I also mentioned some of the SEO best practices, and where to find out more about SEO. Finally, I went over the most popular search engine optimization platforms, including tools for content creation, web structure, copywriting and more.

I hope you liked the article, but on top of this, I hope you got to learn something new.

Please, comment down below. 
Every opinion on how to improve the content of this blog will allow me to make adjustments on the go with the objective of providing better and more accurate information for you.

Sincerely,

Alberto Salas