A well-rounded marketing strategy requires a lot of moving parts, each of which must work cohesively and contribute to the success of the whole.
Digital PR enhances your credibility as a brand. Solid human-focused content reinforces your authority in the eyes of consumers. Social media personalizes your brand.
But what about SEO marketing? How does search engine optimization improve your marketing efforts?
Let’s break it down.
SEO is the process of optimizing your branded content online. This includes website pages, sales pages, guest posts, and most additional forms of digital marketing content. SEO cleans up this content so that it shows up in search engine results. There are multiple forms of SEO, including:
It’s important to understand the differences and utilize the various forms of SEO as part of a larger marketing strategy. When done correctly, this can unlock a variety of benefits, including:
SEO also helps cultivate a sense of trust as consumers see your quality content appear in targeted search results over and over again.
SEO is a search engine-centric activity. A quality SEO strategy signals to search engines like Google Search what kind of information your content contains. This allows these search tools to answer search queries by matching your content to users with related search intent.
As an example, consider a plumber that creates a basic article on unclogging a drain. They use SEO best practices, such as including a target keyword phrase like “unclogging a drain” or “how to unclog a drain pipe.”
“When a user asks Google “how to unclog a drain,” the search engine can easily find and use the plumber’s resource as a suggested answer on its SERPs. If clicked on by the user, the piece of SEO-optimized content generates organic traffic to the website.
SEO can feel like a magic trick. Given enough time (SEO often takes at least six months or more to really kick in), a well-optimized piece of content can generate a steady flow of organic traffic to a website for a very long time.
This can make it tempting to pour all of your resources into SEO content. But you have to resist that temptation.
Good SEO requires balance. SEO success should always come as part of a larger growth marketing plan.
For instance, when investing in on-page and technical SEO, you also want to make sure you’re creating solid content that benefits your target audience. This means it should always prioritize the reader and only optimize for search engines after reader value has been satisfied.
Fortunately, there are times when you can overlap SEO and other growth marketing efforts at the same time. Digital PR often includes drafting guest posts on other websites and industry publications. Along with building brand credibility, this is a great way to invest in link building and generate value through off-page SEO.
The important thing is to keep each SEO effort strong and balanced with other digital marketing initiatives. This will give you the greatest synergy and the best results over time.
SEO is a powerful marketing tool. However, it isn’t the kind of investment you can make lightly.
On the contrary, SEO best practices are constantly in a state of flux as Google and other search engines tweak their algorithms and change how they search for quality content. This requires ongoing research.
In addition, properly integrating SEO into existing marketing is tricky. It requires the ability to maximize on and off-page SEO without sacrificing the impact of other things, like your social media marketing or digital PR.
This is where working with an SEO company can be a game changer. An SEO agency can bring experience and bleeding-edge SEO knowledge to the table along with the tools to track and confirm that they are delivering results.
If your brand is coming up short in the SEO department, consider working with an SEO company. The targeted investment in optimizing your content can infuse your marketing efforts with a synergy that will continue to deliver results far into the future.
