What is SEO in Marketing? Key Tips to Dominate Google
- Toucan Insights Staff
- May 18, 2022
- 8 min read
Updated: May 19, 2024
Introduction
A higher website rating significantly raises the likelihood of obtaining organic traffic. According to studies, the majority of people click on the first page of search engine results.
As a result, achieving a high ranking can result in a considerable boost in website traffic.
This makes SEO critical since it increases your website's visibility, resulting in increased visitors and opportunities to convert prospects into customers.
While it is technically possible for a website to rank without SEO, it is highly unlikely that it will reach a high ranking or attract new prospects in today's online landscape.
Table of Contents
1. What is SEO in Marketing?
SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. This concept refers to the process that involves optimizing web pages so that they rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP).
This end goal of SEO in marketing is that when people search on search engines for products or services related to your offering, the higher your pages rank in search results, the more likely you are to attract new and potential clients to your website.
The advantages of properly implementing SEO in marketing are essential to increasing the likelihood of a perfect match between the users' search intent and the content or offerings on your website.
2. How Does Google Work?
To understand SEO you must first comprehend how search engines, like Google, work.
Going straight to the point, the process through which search engines read your web pages to assess your content is referred to as "crawling".
Google, in particular, gathers the most important data and keeps it in its website database, often known as its "index".
Moreover, Google categorizes every web page as if it were a large library of information saved on the internet.
At the same time, they gathered the most relevant information regarding each user's search intent. So whenever users search for a topic they will show the most relevant content for that query.
It is for this reason that incorporating SEO into a digital strategy will help businesses control the search terms that make their content pop up, which as a result will help them to attract their target audience and boost conversions.
3. Benefits of Having a Great SEO Strategy
Your products or services will certainly be found by your target by generating relevant content tailored for your audience, in addition to the other set of implementations and enhancements on your site.
Some statistics claim that the first five organic results account for 67.60% of all the clicks on Google.
This shows that ranking consistently on the first page can give you a huge amount of free clicks.
Furthermore, by developing content that matches the users' search terms, you will be one step closer to bringing the right audience to your organization’s website.
This means that the people visiting your website are more likely to convert into customers.
The more work you put into optimizing your web pages the better your results will be in the long term.
SEO Agencies ensure a continuous stream of website traffic in a much cheaper and constant way than advertising.
Once you have a solid organic strategy in place you can implement paid search tactics (SEM), also known as advertising, to further bring traffic to your website.
SEO On-page & SEO Off-page
Going back to SEO, it is estimated that Google uses more than 200 factors to rank every website.
These ranking factors fall into 2 categories: “On-page” SEO and “Off-page” SEO.
4. On-page SEO
On-page SEO refers to all the actions and information that is present in a website and that it can be directly controlled by the company (website owner).
This information includes the headlines, titles, meta tags, alt text, the content of the web pages, and the page structure and other background data using the HTML code, to name a few.
The goal is to ensure a smooth user experience and to improve the website's structure by offering valuable content. In short, these are the factors you can control and directly change to improve your SERP rank.
5. Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to all the ranking factors that you cannot directly control. These efforts take place outside of your website property.
Off-page SEO mainly consists of getting references from other websites to promote your company. Some examples are backlinks, guest posts or guest blogging, mentions, etc.
Some key aspects that impact the outcome of the Off-page actions are:
a. The number of shares your content has on the internet, including social media.
b. The DA (Domain authority) and PA (Page Authority) of the domains linking to your website.
6. 4 Key Factors to Reach the First Page on Google
a. Crawlability
To ensure that Google can fully display your content, you must make sure that your website is simple to search.
For this, Google uses internal links when crawling your website to find new pages.
To ensure that Google can find your content and properly index it, you should correctly link each page on your website.
b. Loading Speed
Google is aware of how easily annoyed users can become when a website takes too long to load.
Additionally, when it takes too long for each page to load, your customers are more likely to give up on their shopping or account creation.
In an effort to encourage user-friendliness, Google rewards websites with quick and efficient navigation.
A useful tip here is to use fewer high-resolution images and switch to a faster web host. These are just two examples of how to speed up your page load time.
Tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights can tell you what your loading speed is and how you can improve it.
c. Mobile-Friendliness
Since 2016, more people use mobile devices and tablets than desktop computers to browse the internet.
This is the reason Google declared that in 2018, they would elevate mobile friendliness to a crucial ranking factor.
As a result, even if your page is performing flawlessly on the desktop when the mobile version is not optimized, the ranking factor may still suffer.
Consequently, we advise using Google's tool to determine how mobile-friendly your website is and what you can do to make it more so.
d. Title Tag and Meta Description
This is the information that is displayed in the SERP that describes the content of each web page.
Together with the title tag, this is the first information that people see about your web page.
SEO agencies focus on making it clear what each page is about and persuade the users to click on it by writing an attractive description with a call to action.
A good tip is to also add snippets to your meta description to provide more useful information like user-generated reviews, your organization's phone number, and more.
7. Pillars of an effective SEO strategy
a. SEO is More than Good Content
To make your SEO strategy stand out, SEO agencies employ a substantial number of SEO tools. Understanding what makes good content for SEO is crucial because it involves more than just offering high-quality information.
In order to improve your chances of ranking highly on search engines, we'll go over the essential advice for creating the best content from an SEO perspective in the paragraphs that follow.
b. First Write for People, Then for Google
The idea that an algorithm evaluates and ranks your content is one that can easily get you off track. However, a central aspect of algorithms is that they are built around a strong user-centric perspective.
Search engines like Google strive to provide users with the most pertinent results related to their search query.
Despite this, users are the ones who decide whether or not to click on your website and if the information that you are providing is valuable or not.
As a result, you must begin concentrating on the users' search intent and on using the same language as your target audience.
Because of this, you should take into account the words and phrases that people use to look for the things that you offer and promote on your website.
What you have to do is, first conduct your keyword research and keyword analysis in SEO, and select the strongest keywords that are aligned with the objectives of each of your web pages.
Avoid abusing the number of keywords that you use per page together with having too many sentences repeating the same keyword. Remember, write for people.
Try to include your keywords in a smart and natural way that matches the flow of the content.
The aim is to optimize your page from a clear UX (user experience) perspective and to provide value to the user around a specific topic. This is where content marketing comes into play.
To know more about content marketing and why it is important for your SEO ranking, read this article: What is Strategic Content Marketing & 5 Reasons Why you Need It.
c. Don’t Fall into the Trap of Black-Hat SEO
SEO is a mid to long-term strategy.
Don’t fool yourself by expecting to be on the first page of Google overnight.
This would simply not happen. It takes months to outrank a site that has been there for a long time.
Unlike paid search results, you can’t pay to get ranked higher for your organic results.
However, there is an approach to SEO that some marketers use to gain a quick boost in their page ranking.
This type of SEO strictly focuses on bending the rules of search engines to improve your ranking position faster than usual.
Implementing these practices on your website adds no value for the users, and you even run the risk of having your website banned for violating search engine guidelines.
Furthermore, any progress your website could have made in terms of search results will be eliminated by search engines due to their constant monitoring of technical implementations.
White-hat SEO is the recommended approach for optimizing your content.
This approach focuses on bringing value to the user and on producing high-quality content and as a result will improve your ranking on SERP.
In short, there is no shortcut when it comes to putting effort and time into your SEO strategy to ensure stable and long-term growth.
d. Patience is Key
There’s no fixed period of time until you start seeing the results of your SEO strategy as this can vary greatly, from a few weeks to almost a year.
However, once you have put enough work into optimizing your pages for Google (or other search engines) you will see the results in the form of web traffic and conversions.
After some weeks, your pages will start ranking and as a result, they will appear on the search engine results page.
After some months you will be able to validate if the keyword selection was the appropriate one or if you need to optimize your strategy.
That’s the moment when you should analyze what went well and what could be improved.
SEO is an ongoing process and therefore you should regularly monitor the performance and make the necessary changes to keep your content relevant.
Google’s algorithm is constantly getting smarter and new ranking rules are being introduced or changed.
It is important to keep up with the latest SEO practices in order to avoid losing places on the results page.
Conclusion
Companies can increase website traffic and conversions by working with SEO agencies to help their content be found online and rank higher in search results.
To rank highly on search engines, you need to focus on both on-page and off-page SEO.
Always write for your audience using the words and phrases they use to search for products and services like yours.
The most crucial aspects to examine are domain, title tags, meta descriptions, backlinks, keywords, content, and backlinks.
