If you are looking to boost your online presence, you would want to know a thing or two about SEO marketing and how to leverage it for your website.
In this SEO marketing guide, we will teach you what is SEO and all about the process of search engine optimisation. By the end of this guide, you will know what SEO means and how it works.
Here at Numero, one of the most common questions we get from small business owners is: “What is SEO in marketing?”
If you have just started your digital marketing journey or build your website recently, SEO can be overwhelming. However, that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.
So let’s get right to the topic.
What is SEO?
SEO is an acronym for search engine optimisation. It is the process of improving your website’s ranking in the search engine’s organic results or the unpaid section.
In plain English, SEO involves optimising your website’s content to make it highly relevant to your target keywords so that the search engines would find it extremely relevant to specific search queries and show the page as a top result for them.
In essence, SEO is all about making some changes to your website content and design to make it more appealing to the search engines.
Benefits of SEO
There are several advantages of investing in SEO for your Kiwi business
- By optimising your website for your target keywords, you are working to boost your visibility in the search engines. This in turn will improve your traffic, leads and sales.
- By adding useful, engaging, optimised content, you can improve your chances of driving targeted traffic to your website organically.
- By improving your site and content for better online visibility and readability, you make your SEO process meaningful.
How SEO Works in Marketing?
Search engines seek to offer the best experience to their users.
This means showing results that are extremely useful and relevant to the search intent. To that end, the search engines crawl or scan different websites to understand their topic and relevance. This allows the search engines to deliver highly relevant listings for a given keyword or topic.
The search engines don’t stop there. Remember, they aim to offer the best experience to search users. And that doesn’t end with high quality, relevant content. That’s why the search engines will crawl your website to identify how user-friendly it is, how easy it is to navigate, whether it is mobile-friendly among other things to reward websites that offer the best user experience with a higher ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
There are three crucial parties in the context of SEO – your website, Google (or any other search engine for that matter) and the search user. If you have a page about how to take still photography, you want Google to list it at the top of the search results when someone searches for the words “still photography”.
SEO is the secret ingredient that you add to your article to improve your chances of Google showing up your page in the top results when people search for that keyword.
Google considers more than 200 ranking factors when ranking a website in its search index. However, just like everything, there are two sides to SEO – the good and the bad. Let’s take a look at these.
White Hat vs Black Hat SEO Techniques
SEO is a long-term strategy and shortcuts don’t work. However, in your quest for lowering your cost on SEO, if you end up choosing a cheap SEO consultant, you may end up doing hurting your search rankings.
You must make sure you are investing in white hat SEO techniques and not black hat SEO by an experienced SEO agency in NZ. What’s the difference?
Black hat SEO is all about ranking a site in the search engines without any regard for the target audience. This strategy results in poor quality, spammy pages that are likely to get banned quickly. Common black hat strategies include duplicate content, links from websites that don’t have any relevant content, keyword stuffing, invisible text and cloaking.
On the other hand, white hat SEO is the way to build a sustainable online presence. By going down this route, you are prioritising your target audience and are focused on providing the best user experience.
A white hat SEO strategy means creating useful, relevant content, unique page titles, relevant references and links, standards-compliant HTML, good grammar and spelling among other things.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is all about optimising the elements that are in your control, the elements that occur on your website. Here are some crucial on-page SEO factors that will boost your search rankings in Google:
- Title tag
- Meta description
- Sub-headings
- Internal links
- Optimised images
- ALT tags
- Content
- Site architectures
- Page load speed
- Mobile-friendliness
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO elements are things that happen out of your website. You don’t have any direct control over these elements but they have an immense impact on your rankings.
Here are some important off-page SEO factors that affect your search rankings:
- Trust – Trust is an extremely important factor that Google considers when ranking websites. The quality of your backlinks plays a great part here. There are four aspects to building trust:
- Domain & page authority
- Bounce rate
- Domain age
- Brand identity
- Links – Backlinks a great way to improve your rankings. However, the quality of the links matters. Links from spammy websites can get your website banned from the search engine results pages. Instead, you must put in the time to launch an outreach campaign to earn backlinks from authority websites.
- Social Profile – Social signals are another important off-page SEO factor.
Conclusion
We hope this helps answer your question: “What is SEO in Marketing?”
Having the right online presence is ever more important and a well-designed SEO strategy is essential to that end.
If you are not sure where to begin or can’t find the time to launch your own SEO strategy, trust the experts at Numero to boost your online presence with our carefully crafted SEO strategy for your business.
