Why is search engine optimisation important?

‘Search engine optimisation’ (SEO) is vital to the success of any business, both online and offline. Every webmaster should understand what SEO is, how it works as well as the traffic potential it can generate for all types of websites. While paid advertising (PPC), social media marketing as well as other online channels can send traffic to websites, the bulk of online traffic is driven by search engines.

Organic search results:

• Take up more digital real estate,
• Appear more credible to savvy searchers, and
• Get a lot more clicks than paid advertisements do. For example, of all US searches only approximately 2.8% of these people click on paid advertisements.

Basically SEO has approximately 20 times more traffic opportunities than PPC on both mobile devices and desktop.

In addition, SEO is one of the only digital marketing channels that, when it is set up correctly, can carry on paying dividends over time. If you deliver a solid piece of content, which deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can increase exponentially over time. This is opposed to advertising which requires continuous funding in order to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting cleverer with each passing day however they still require our help. Optimising your website for SEO will assist with delivering better information to search engines. In this way, the content on your site can be properly indexed as well as displayed within search results.

The most important parts of SEO

The days of keywords being the only SEO technique that mattered are over. However, this doesn’t mean these terms aren’t still crucial. The change is that, in order to be effective, today keywords must be:

• Well-researched,
• Carefully selected, and
• Thoughtfully used in your content.

When you research your keywords, it’s important to:

• Seek out ones that have high search rates in addition to low competition,
• Select short-tail keywords (for example, dog), long-tail keywords (for example, terrier puppies for sale), and local keywords (for example, puppies for sale in Boston) that you can work into your content.

It is also possible to utilise keywords in order to optimise all your:

• Titles,
• URLs, and
• other on-page SEO elements.

Content is an extremely important part of SEO. This is because it’s the vehicle you use to influence and engage audiences. For example, if you owned a nursery – and wanted to up your visibility – you might could a series of blogs about:

• Gardening,
• Choosing the correct species of plants,
• Growing tips.

When a person who wanted to learn more about gardening went looking for that information, your blog would come up. Thus, you would be able to build a relationship with that prospect by giving them valuable information. When the time came for that person to buy a plant, for example, you’d be the port of call.

Today content must be educational. However, it must also thought-provoking, relevant, engaging as well as shareable. Content comes in a number of forms. These include:

• Landing page content
• Videos
• Blogs
• Infographics
• Podcasts
• Whitepapers and e-books
• Social media posts
• Local Listings

If you own your own organisation, or manage a website of any type, you want to draw traffic to your website. SEO is super important as it’s specifically aimed at assisting you with doing just this as well as:

• Improving your online presence,
• Increasing traffic, and
• Helping your reach your ultimate goals.

Is SEO required for every type of business? The simple answer is yes! If your business offers products or services – where users type in search queries to find information – then SEO should be a high priority for you.

If this what interests you – which it should, check out DSM’s SEO course or Digital Marketing Course for the latest and most applicable marketing education around.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

If this what interests you – which it should, check out DSM’s SEO course or Digital Marketing Course for the latest and most applicable marketing education around.