Why SEO Is An Important Part Of An Overall Marketing Strategy
You may have heard of SEO, but do you know what it means and how important it is to be a part of your overall marketing strategy? Well, if you don’t, don’t panic! We’ve got you covered.
First, let’s cover the basics. SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’, and it’s basically the technical term for optimising a website in order for it to rank well on search engines, like Google and Bing.
We understand that to a lot of people SEO can perhaps go to the sidelines, especially if you are unaware of the benefits it can have on your rankings on the internet. Long story short, if your business has a website then you need to be putting time aside in your overall marketing strategy to improve your SEO. If you haven’t got a website, then why on earth not?!
There are many things involved in improving the SEO of your website and we are going to discuss these with you today and explain the benefits of why you should be looking at this for your overall marketing strategy.
The main goal of Search Engine Optimisation is to increase traffic to your website, which can be done by improving your rankings on search engines. With almost 33% of clicks going to the first page of results and 75% of the overall clicks going towards the first five listings, you can see why you need to consider working on your SEO. Without working on SEO, the only other way that you can get onto the first page of results is by carrying out competitive PPC campaigns, which will incur an ongoing financial cost.
Content
Uploading content plays an important role in the optimisation of a website and by uploading regularly, search engines are able to see that constant effort is being put into a site every time it is crawled. However, it is essential when writing the content that this is relevant to both the page and site you’re uploading it to and the information is accurate and up to date. You see, a search engine’s raison d’etre is to direct users to a website that satisfies their initial search query. A page with informative content that’s accurate is sure to be of use to a person who lands on it while ensuring that said content is relevant to the site’s content as a whole will lend further credence to it.
When writing content, you must first highlight the keyword that you think would be most relevant to the user’s search and make sure that the content you write reflects this. By doing this you will ensure that your content is considered high quality and relevant by the search engine, helping to increase your rankings.
Content can be added in the form of new pages on your website, uploading blogs, videos, guides or product pages. For more information on the content that you could benefit from creating, to improve your SEO ranking, get in touch with Fuel Communications and integrate this into your overall marketing strategy today.
Keyword Density
As we’ve already mentioned, keywords must be chosen in terms of the relevancy to the content you are writing, and how useful this is to the user. However, with keywords, you need to be aware of how often you use these in your content, over optimising your keywords can begin to ruin your website’s ability to rank. With the reason for search engine optimisation being that you are aiming to increase your rankings, the last thing you’ll want to do is over optimise your content and lose all the hard work that you have put in.
Inbound And Outbound Links
Ever wondered where the name ‘website’ comes from? Well…it actually refers to the web of links on a website. To help increase your SEO rankings, you’ll need to look at adding internal and external links across your website to direct users through different pages of your site. Not only will this help you SEO, but it will also help to keep visitors on your site longer and reduce the bounce rate. If your business provides a number of services, it would be recommended to link each of the services to each other. For example, a clothing company may include a link to winter accessories (such as hats & scarves) on a web page advertising coats. By doing this, you will indirectly focus attention onto another page on the site and could also benefit from cross-selling.
Search engines also favour outbound links on your website. Looking at the previous example of a clothing company, outbound links that you may look to add in here, are perhaps linking to a charity that you may be working with, or an award that you’ve won. Not only will this assist in improving organic search rankings, but it will also provide users with information on these payment options that they may not have otherwise considered.
Metadata
As we’ve previously mentioned, the relevance of keywords to your content is important, this is the same with metadata which also demonstrates relevance to search engines. There are a few types of metadata that are usually used in search engine optimisation, of which they are:
- Meta Tags
- Title Tags
- Image Alt Attributes
Firstly, the most commonly known metadata is meta tags, this is essentially your meta description which is inputted into the back end of your website. The meta description is one of the only things in metadata that is actually visible to users, as this is often what is used as the description of your site/page on search results. The optimum character count for these are between 130 and 156 characters and although this won’t directly impact rankings, it will help to increase customer clicks.
Title tags are used to describe what your web page is about, and can also be known as the meta title. This is one of the other parts of metadata that is visible to web visitors, that are shown on the search engine results pages, web browsers (placeholders on web tabs) and also on social media (presented when linked on social messages). It’s important to include your target keywords in this as this will help to keep your page relevant to the content that you have included and ensure that people visiting your page are going to receive the information that they are looking for.
By providing image tags and alt attributes to the images on your website, this helps to make your website more accessible to users as well as strengthening the message of your articles. The alt. tag allows blind or visually impaired users to use screen readers informing them of what is on the web page and what the images show. Without this, the screen readers will not be able to identify the subject matter of images on a website.
SEO Tools
With the likes of SEMrush, Google Search Console and Google Keyword Planner, these will help you to carry out the research required to help improve your SEO rankings quicker than manual research. This allows for the fast pace of the internet and helps to ensure that changes to the research are not missed. With tools like SEMrush, you can get an in-depth analysis into your website’s ranking on search engines. One particularly handy feature allows you to compare your rankings to those of your competitors on the keywords that you’d like to focus on within your business.
As discussed previously, keywords play an important role in your search engine rankings, however, in order for this to be successful, it’s highly recommended to carry out keyword research beforehand to make sure that you are targeting keywords and search phrases that are actually being searched. This can be done using the google keyword planner available on Google Adwords, but there are other avenues available.
Overall, there are many things involved in SEO to improve your rankings on search engines. However, the significant point to take away from this is that SEO is a vitally important part of your overall marketing strategy to ensure that your website is visible to as many people as possible to help increase sales or awareness of your product or service. SEO is not something that only certain industries have to think about, it is a vital consideration for anyone that has an online presence.
If you’d like to discuss how an SEO strategy could help you, please contact our team today on 01752 987909 or email alem@fuel-growth.com, who can help you to integrate search engine optimisation into your overall marketing strategy.
