Most people have likely heard the term SEO. But are they really familiar with what SEO and specifically, SEO marketing entails? 

Having a webpage and a dynamic online footprint is one thing. But ensuring that all of your digital components work together and what’s more, get you the leads that you need is quite another. This is where SEO marketing comes into play.

When we are talking about SEO marketing, we are talking about a comprehensive strategy. Everything has to align, all of the pieces have to work cohesively in order to make it so that clients not only find you but they want to look further. In this article, we discuss the importance of SEO marketing for your business, as well as some of the strategies that have proven most effective when it comes to getting your business found and ranked.

The Benefits of a Solid SEO Strategy

First off, let’s examine some of the benefits to having an SEO strategy in place for your brand. SEO, or search engine optimization, is essentially a way that marketers get businesses found. Where do people go when they want to look for a certain company, product, or service? They start with the search engines. Being optimized for those search engines, namely Google, is what SEO is all about.

However, since its inception, SEO marketing has also come to incorporate social media, video, basically any place where your business can be found there are SEO tactics that can be put into place. The other great thing about having a comprehensive and uniform SEO strategy is that it ensures that your brand messaging is on target across all relevant platforms. This is why so many companies do opt to work with marketing agencies and firms who specialize in SEO marketing. They can lead you in the right direction when it comes to how and when to target certain searches and audiences in general.

Among several of the key benefits of finetuning your SEO strategy are:

1. It helps ensure your content gets seen

People work hard to create content that engages consumers and creates a favorable impression of the brand. However, if this content goes unseen, what good is it really doing you? SEO strategies help ensure that the content you work hard to create or that you have created by a marketing agency actually gets seen by the most relevant users.

2. SEO Marketing helps you stay competitive

Whether or not your competitors are in fact employing SEO strategies, you yourself want to maintain a competitive edge, right? And this is precisely how you do that. SEO is about getting found and getting the results that you desire. If a customer searches, for example, for the “best interior designer near me,” and you’ve done your SEO due diligence, then you should come up toward the top of their list. This is being competitive. This is ensuring your name and your brand are right in front of their face.

3. The right content makes your site more user-friendly

By having SEO driven content incorporated into your website, you only stand to make that website more user-friendly and more relevant for the people who are trying to find your product or service. Make no mistake about it, there is an art to SEO. Done the right way, it can make a huge difference in terms of not just your site but your overall online footprint, to include your social media accounts, your YouTube channel, your LinkedIn account, you name it.

4. A sound SEO plan can improve engagement

Getting found online is one thing, having users actually engage with your site and/or brand is another. With an optimized strategy in place, the traffic that you get will be higher quality traffic. This means that these are people who are legitimately looking to purchase or looking to engage. And engagement really is the name of the game.

What is Offsite SEO?

Offsite SEO uses many of the same methodologies of onsite SEO, but they are applied on other brand’s URLS.  Often times directories are used for Offsite SEO, as well as Social Media.  The most common method of offsite SEO is the use of backlinks, which are critical for telling Google who and where you are as well as what types of services and products you offer – and to whom.

What are the Alternatives to SEO?

 If you would like to try an alternative to digital marketing, there is a plethora of options to expose your brand offline.

When gaining brand exposure offline, you are still focused on keywords and optimizing your presence per se, but you are not necessarily using the Internet to do so.

Some people equate offline branding and advertising to more “old-school” marketing tactics. It really is all the same thing; meaning, it’s about getting people to think about your brand, search for your brand, and use the appropriate words to do so.

Among some of the key ways the people engage in “offline SEO” (a new term we just found out people were searching):

• Yes, billboards have been a tried-and-true staple of marketing for ages and there is a reason for that…They work. People are driving, they see a sign representing your business, they are curious and consequently go and look for that business. This drives traffic to your site and that helps with SEO.

• Getting your name in the news. While this can be a little bit trickier, it is a surefire way to help generate a buzz around your brand. When people become excited or curious or intrigued by a brand, they tend to look that brand up. And again, more traffic leads to more hits which leads to more customers.

• Sponsoring a local event. Businesses will frequently engage with their local community. They might sponsor a charity; they might collaborate with a softball team; they might help fund an event. All of these things are a great way to get your name out there and therefore get people thinking about you as a brand. Any searches that are then performed, are all a part of enhancing your SEO strategy.

• Become affiliated with your Chamber of Commerce. The local Chamber of Commerce is a great way to get more people to engage with your company. The Chamber of Commerce will likely list your business on their site and possibly provide a link to your own website. This in turn will of course generate more traffic over the long term.

The Best SEO is Organic SEO

When it comes to SEO marketing, there are number of approaches possible. Some marketers might opt to pay in order to up a company’s SEO game. And while this is certainly one way to get results, are these really the results that you want?

When searching for an SEO marketing agency with which to work, you want to be careful that they really do prioritize organic SEO. Organic search engine optimization simply means that you’re not paying to boost your rankings. You are relying upon algorithm-based results that grow overtime. These by and large have proven to be the best type of results as well as the most profitable results that a company can get.

Organic SEO is often achieved through website and webpage optimization, authentic link building, using the right types of headings, subheading, and tags, among other strategies. A marketing agency that understands what SEO is truly about will know the various ways to help your company get a boost in the rankings and get better engagement rates across the board, on all platforms.

This is what we do: we want to take your SEO game to the next level but in an organic and legitimate way that results in more leads and more business. It’s not about pay-per-click tricks or black hat tactics. It’s about understanding the optimal ways to navigate the digital world so that your brand gets found.

If you are ready to get started on your SEO marketing campaign, click on the Blue “Request a Consultation” button in the upper right hand corner of your screen today!