Search engine marketing is one of those services you will typically be offered when you go to a web development and online advertising agency for support. It is one of the areas you need to work on when you build a website or revamp an existing one. It is right up there in importance along with user interface and content quality because it has the ability to make or break your brand marketing efforts on the internet.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been widely practiced pretty much ever since search engines have become indispensable tools for users. You may have heard a little bit (or a lot) about it over time and somebody may have recommended it to you at some point. If you have not jumped the gun by now and adopted SEO in your digital marketing strategy, here are some of the benefits of search engine optimization for you to think about.

What is SEO for websites?

Search engine optimization is a type of search engine marketing exercise whose main objective is to increase the traffic to your website through organic search results. It is part of the website building process that focuses on setting up your content so that search engines like Google, Bing, and yes, even Yahoo! will consider your site relevant to specific searches.

How does it work?

A search engine is an online directory for virtually everything you can think of. The idea of looking up anything online has become so inculcated in our culture that the act of “Googling” for information has become an accepted action word.

Search engines work in three ways: crawl, index and retrieve.They crawl the Internet to index pages so that they can retrieve these pages when users search for them. Consider a search engine like your library’s card catalogue which has a system of organizing information, always ready for when visitors search through it.

But how does Google (and other search engines, for that matter) know which sites are relevant to your search?

Search engines send crawlers to websites and web pages all over the Internet, looking for “authority” pages on every topic and keyword known to man based on the page content. So when a user enters a query using a set of words into the search engine, he or she gets a list of pages that are considered most relevant to the search.

How the webpage is ranked depends on its relevance to particular searches. In the past, SEO and search engine marketing was just a matter of filling up your content with the keywords you want that page to rank for and your page will seem like an “authority” on that topic for search engines. Content coherence was not a priority because crawlers are blind to quality and are more programmed to “count” the frequency that a keyword or phrase comes up in a webpage.

These days, however, any SEO expert will tell you that content is king and how you craft your content along with the type of keywords and key phrases you use are important to get your page listed on top of search engine results. Search engines are no longer after keyword density. They are also looking at the quality of the content and how timely the information is.

Why is SEO important?

An innovative and responsive web design and content are useless if there’s no one to see it. The growth of your brand and your business, in general, is highly reliant on visibility – your ability to get into your target market’s line of sight. Your website has to be searchable for your brand to stay in your audience’s radar.

SEO presents a cost-effective digital marketing strategy to attract traffic to your website. Internet users still rely on the keywords or phrase searches to find content online. Tapping into the potential of search engines to direct traffic to your content is one of the most efficient ways of getting your message heard. Search engine marketing efforts still work to this day because the practice of content searches and keywords are still tightly linked together.

How do you optimize your website?

As search engines adapt and change their algorithms to suit the massively dynamic behavior and content needs of their users, search engine optimization goes through an evolution in itself. SEO experts have to step up and be more innovative in terms of building and sharing content to attract traffic to their client websites.

An SEO company may use a number of different strategies to improve your website’s search engine ranking.

• Keyword research – understanding the keywords or phrases that people use to search for your specific product or service. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a good way to start. Planning your website content on a variety of keywords and phrases related to your product will help you ensure that your site is optimized for popular searches.
• This brings us to your content. After identifying the phrases and keywords that are popularly used for your niche service, it is now time to plan your content. In the past, all you need to do to optimize your website is to fill up your content with keywords with little to no regard for content coherence. Nowadays, content is king and quality is a priority. Creating positive user experiences and making every user’s visit a productive and interactive one is important to SEO.
• Social Media Marketing – another element of digital marketing comes in to play when we speak of search engine marketing. Content communities and social media platforms are crucial to building “authority” on a product or service.
• Quality backlinks are also crucial to maximizing the benefits of search engine optimization to your brand. Backlinks can come from product reviews, press releases and any content that talk about your products and link back to your website.
• Product images can also be used in search engine optimization.

Can I DIY SEO?

The short answer is yes. In theory, anything can be DIY-ed. You can plan out your SEO strategy as part of your website building exercise. If you are quite knowledgeable about the kind of content your site will contain and how your target audience behaves, tweaking your page to ensure that it incorporates the most popular keywords and phrases used to search your content should be feasible. In fact, it is not uncommon for startups and small businesses to do the search engine marketing on their own.

The good thing about DIY search engine marketing is you have full control of your SEO strategy and you get to implement changes on your site as soon as possible. There’s no need for you to go to an external agency or another person for adjustments. You get to reap the benefits of search engine optimization virtually free of charge.

DIY SEO comes with a few caveats, however. Digital marketing and search engine optimization, in particular, takes time – something that even small business owners may not have a lot of. Optimizing your site, building and distributing content and maintaining the site’s search engine rank may take the backseat when you have a million and one other things to think about as a business owner.

How much does SEO cost?

A search engine optimization company would charge a different rate depending on the type of SEO service you require. There are several options that you can explore – from content planning and building and social media marketing to analytics, local SEO and pay-per-click services. Rates can go from a few hundred dollars to thousands depending on the scale of the project and the requirements of your brand. Retainer fees for an SEO expert will also vary depending on the complexity of the project and how much time is required to complete it.

Is SEO services worth the money?

SEO services are not created equally and anyone can claim to be an SEO expert. If you are thinking of getting the help of an SEO agency to handle your digital marketing concerns, you want to make sure that you are getting your money’s worth.

Investing in quality SEO services takes a bit of time and research. You need to have a clear picture of what you want to achieve for your brand as far as digital marketing is concerned. As there are many types of services available under this umbrella, you are more likely to maximize the benefits of search engine optimization if you work with a reliable online advertising agency.

What are the new trends in SEO today?

SEO experts see a lot of new trends happening in search engine optimization for 2018 that could help boost search engine ranks for business websites.

1. Responsive web design – interactive and fast-loading websites are going to be the norm moving forward. People want their information and they want it to come as soon as possible. Clean up your website and get rid of unnecessary information so the pages load faster.
2. Mobile friendly – people are always on the go and are more inclined to search for information on their mobile devices. Investing in mobile app development and making sure your business website is mobile friendly is important to help you reach more consumers easily and every since 2015 Google released Mobilegeddon and is getting more and more important.
3. Long tail keywords – stop banging your head on the wall trying to compete for the common keywords relevant to your site content. Go long-tail instead. Descriptive key phrases get you specific niche customers for your business.
4. Voice search – optimize your website content with conversational keywords specifically for people who do voice searches.
5. Web security – search engines love secure websites. A switch to HTTPS from HTTP helps you secure connections and information on your website. It also keeps your user at ease and reassures them that any data they submit to your website is safe.

Now we know if you are a business owner or call yourself an “entrepreneur”, SEO shouldn’t be a concept that is foreign to you. We wanted to discuss a few of the benefits of implementing search engine optimization in your marketing mix, don’t let anyone fool you. SEO is alive and well and will be here for a long time.Google makes hundreds of changes to its algorithms every year and while SEO has drastically changed over the years the organic sections of search engines still get the most activity from users.

What questions do you have about the benefits of SEO?