Fundamentals of SEO

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is SEO?

Let’s start with a basic question: What exactly is SEO. The term ‘SEO’ stands for ‘search engine optimization’. Put simply, it involves optimizing your website to that it can be found by search engines and rank highly on the results page.

What does this mean in practice? SEO is the process of getting free traffic from search results on search engines, specifically through organic and natural search. So, you can think of SEO as a strategic approach to your website content to help your website show up on search engine results pages (SERPs) when people are looking for specific topics. Ideally, when people are looking for something, the search engine finds your website!

Let’s think about how you can achieve this. Fundamentally, SEO first involves anticipating and researching the type of content topics that your audience is looking for. Then you can create and fill your website with these content topics. If everything goes according to plan, when they search online, you are likely to show up.

Furthermore, you can adapt existing content by including additional keywords in the content that already exists on your website. This is important to remember: you don’t need to create new content every time. Instead, you can optimize your existing content. In fact, optimizing your content, also known as on-page optimization, is an efficient way of driving valuable organic search traffic because the content creation piece is already done. It just needs to be optimized for visibility on search engines.

However, SEO includes more than just content creation and on-page optimization. It also involves making sure that your website is technically optimized to be search engine friendly.

In addition, it's important to encourage links from other websites pointing back to your own site. These external website links, known as backlinks, are a crucial aspect of off-page optimization and significantly impact your chances of achieving a high ranking in organic search results.

Good SEO

Of course, in order for SEO strategy to work, you have to implement it properly. Good SEO involves thinking about the consumer decision-making process from the audience’s perspective, Basically, consumers are using search engines as a tool to find information. They are searching for answers. You could think of it as if they’re asking their search engine questions. And the answers are the website results that the search engine returns.

So good SEO involves two steps:

• Anticipating the questions that your audience is likely to ask
• Creating the content that will answer those questions

To understand the mindset of your customer, ask yourself questions like:

• What does my target customer need to see, read or do to help them take action?
• What are they looking for to help them decide?

By understanding the topics your audience searches for, when you create optimized content, and feature it on your website, you increase the chances of your site appearing in search engine results.

They have asked the search engine a question, and your website content is listed in the results as a possible answer. To be the answer to someone’s question is a powerful interaction with potential customers! That's why SEO is a powerful tool for connecting with customers during their decision-making or research phase. It enables you to align their needs and interests with what your business has to offer. To do this, you have to research and write your content in a strategic way.

Marketing on search engines

When it comes to marketing on search engines, you can also pay for clicks and traffic when your website shows up in the search results. This is known as paid search (or pay per click, or PPC). It can complement your search strategy when both PPC and SEO are run together as part of a wider digital marketing strategy.

While SEO and paid search are different from each other, they do share some similarities:

• Both require keyword research, so you can build your content around key terms that users are searching for.
• Both require relevant landing pages. You can use the same landing pages to target SEO and paid search.
• Both result in search engine traffic that comes to your website and increases awareness of your brand and, hopefully, eventually leads to conversions (such as sales).

Let’s look at an example of this practice. Not so long ago, I worked with a tech start-up that had developed a brand-new and highly innovative project management tool. They initially targeted highly competitive keywords such as ‘project management tool’ and ‘best team collaboration software’ for their SEO efforts, but they found it difficult to gain any traction.

Since their website was new, I suggested they shift their strategy slightly. It was recommended they initially focus their efforts on PPC ads using these popular keywords. This approach would yield quicker results since these high-demand keywords were too competitive for their current SEO level.

While building their SEO reputation, they also started writing blog posts. These articles didn’t directly compete with the high-demand keywords. Instead, they focused on related, less competitive topics such as ‘Best project management tools for small businesses’ and ‘How to choose a project management tool’.

By adopting this dual strategy, the start-up began to see progress in both SEO and PPC efforts, rather than struggling in silence! A common mistake that both small and larger businesses often make is to focus solely on either SEO or PPC, especially when starting out. However, a more balanced approach, targeting achievable keywords based on the current state of the business, can often be more beneficial.

The SEO experience

When developing your SEO strategy, it’s useful to bear some key principles in mind:

• Traffic from search engines is ‘free’. You’re not paying for the clicks. However, it does require resources and a time investment to research and produce the content for your website.
• Results take time, so be patient. It could take weeks or months, or even years, to see the fruits of your efforts.
• Return on investment is harder to measure, but it does often improve over time.
• Remember that 70–80% of searchers click on SEO results.