What SEO is and how it helps your business is the very first thing to know about internet marketing. So if you have to ask this question, please start here.
What is Internet Marketing?
If you have to ask what SEO is, you likely need to know what internet marketing is. So congratulations; you already took the first step in making your website competitive on the world wide web “market.”
So here goes; internet marketing is the means a company or organization reaches their target audience on the most important resource of our time: the internet.
But how is internet marketing conducted efficiently? There are 5 layers to every well-designed internet marketing plan: collectively known as your content marketing, this includes your organic, site design, paid campaigning, email marketing and social media campaigning. And they all have to be implemented in a certain order.
Many of our clients have come to me and said “James; I want to be at the very top of the page! Above that line thing! Can we just do that?!?!”
My response, after working on said client’s organic marketing for a week or so, is “Those are paid ads. And we could get you ‘there…’ But first let’s quadruple your Google Ads budget!” It’s at this point, the client would usually decline and let me continue building their onpage organic content.
This is because without any organic content in place on your website, you will pay exponentially more for paid ads than you would with a solid organic presence. Search engines make sure of this so businesses and organizations can’t cheat their way to the top. From the bottom up, you need to start with an organic foundation. This not only saves you tons of dough, but gets you in good with Google, Bing and Yahoo.
What is SEO?
“James; what are you talking about? How can I optimize my website for the search engines?!”
Ok, ok… Website SEO (search engine optimization) is just that; site optimization for search engines. For example, when you visit your favorite search engine and type in the question “What is SEO,” the top organic result as of April 2019 is courtesy of Search Engine Land.
The reason I point out the date is because these search engine results aren’t static. Rather, they are fluid and ever-changing based on what certain websites do to their website to update their organic result, be it on-page, off-page, technical, site maturity, etc…
Nothing against Search Engine Land, but as sure as the seasons change, their hit won’t remain #1 on Google for those keywords forever. There are plenty of other digital marketing publications in the world competing for this “spot” consistently updating and refreshing their content, It may not be today… it may not be tomorrow… but someday they will drop to #2. It’s simply the nature of organic marketing.
At the most basic level, you need to update your organic onsite content. This includes your URL, title tags, meta descriptions and on page content. But what is arguably the most important is your onsite content and blogging. The latter two must be written as engaging and educational with appropriate latent semantic indexing… search engines don’t like keyword stuffing.
And because you’re trying to drive traffic from a vast audience and convert new visitors who have never even heard of you or your company, you can only target search engine users with objective content. In other words, if you are trying to drive traffic to your website selling designer window treatments, “designer window treatments” should be the basis of your SEO. Not “Ricks Windows.”
What is Effective SEO?
Now you have an idea of what SEO is, know there are a lot of wrong ways to go about it.
Let’s do a basic P&L scenario; you hire someone to do your internet marketing for $1000/month. How does this marketing professional go about generating you more profit than this loss. Well if the “professional” you hired doesn’t start off addressing your SEO, they are doing you no favors and you should cancel your contract with them ASAP.
The point is, there is plenty you– or the agency you hire– can do to compete in your market.
When we start discussing the more technical components– just as crucial- it’s a little more involved. Some of these components are beyond your control, such as site age. But there are other factors you or a marketing professional can address. These include your backlinking strategy and depth, response codes, site mapping, search engine indexing, Schema Markup and tons more.
If your SEO foundation isn’t solidly in place, your internet marketing “structure” is on shaky ground. When it comes to running your SEO, focus on objectivity, use industry keywords and keyword phrases, and post your blogs to ultimately drive site traffic and business. And do it consistently. That’s it. Or better, yet, leave it to the marketing agency experts.
