What does ‘SEO’ mean in Marketing?

The Internet continues to explode every single day and it has revolutionised the way that many marketing processes take place. For example, Google has coined the term ‘Zero Moment of Truth’ (ZMOT) to describe how the Internet has reshaped the manner in which customers make buying decisions. (To learn more about ZMOT, read our article entitled How you can use the Zero Moment of Truth to Benefit your Social Media Marketing.) So if the Internet is the way people shop then SEO – or Search Engine Optimisation – is the way in which Google makes it easier to find what to shop for.

What does the term ‘SEO’ mean?

As we indicated in the introductory paragraph to this article, ‘SEO’ stands for Search Engine Optimisation. What this means is that SEO is responsible for making it easier for Internet ‘surfers’ to find what they are looking for and increase you visibility in the digital marketing space.

How can SEO assist marketers?

Marketers can harness the power of Search Engine Optimisation to put their websites under the noses of the people who are searching for their products. Here’s a case study of how marketers can use the SEO process to up their website’s visibility.

Jane has received a lot of queries from friends of her parents to housesit their homes and to take care of their animals while they go away. She’s realised that there is a great need for housesitters so she’s decided to set up a website to advertise her services and, hopefully, generate a lot of business for her.

As a graduate of the Digital School of Marketing’s SEO and Web Analytics Course, she knows that the foundation of every good website and digital marketing strategy is SEO as well as choosing the right keywords so that when her potential customers search for housesitters they find her website. This means that, before putting anything together, Jane has to do keyword research.

She was taught that the best way to find out what people are searching for in relation to her services is to pop onto Google Trends and perform a search for housesitters, set the filter to South Africa, and to see what queries searchers are typing into Google that are related to her business offerings. Jane will then build these keywords into the copy on her website so that when a search query is made her website is on the first page of Google’s search rankings. (For more information about Google Trends and other tools to help you in your social media marketing efforts, read our article entitled 3 of the Top Tools to Use in your Social Media Marketing.)

SEO is a fundamental part in your Digital Marketing Strategy

Search Engine Optimisation is widely recognised as an integral part of a digital marketing strategy. Erica Machin from Titan Growth lists some of the reasons for this:

• SEO brings in increased amounts of traffic to your website because your site will be at the top of the search engine results page. This means that you’ll get increased brand awareness because users will be clicking on your site more often because it’s more visible.
• You can see, on your Google Analytics dashboard, the results that SEO brings. This means that it’s very easy to track the return on investment (ROI) brought in by SEO.
• SEO is cost effective because it targets Internet users who are already searching for your product. This means that you don’t have to spend large amounts of cash trying to convert cold leads into customers.
• As you’ll need to rearrange your site’s architecture to make it more SEO friendly, by default you’ll increase your user’s experience as well.

How can you learn more about Search Engine Optimisation?

As Jane did, you too can become an SEO expert by enrolling in the Digital School of Marketing’s SEO and Web Analytics Course. The modules that you may be interested in are – among others:

• What are best practices for onsite and offsite SEO?
• What is meant by Whitehat SEO?
• What should the structure of a website look like?
• What are the different templates for sitemaps and why you need to have them.
• What user experience methodologies are the best?
• Why you need to pay attention to information architecture and website speed.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Every single one of our digital marketing courses is accredited by the MICT SETA. There is no other college out there to boast this prestigious accolade. To learn more and to register for this digital marketing certificate follow this link.