3 key reasons SEO should be in your 2022 digital strategy

SEO is vital in your digital strategy. But why? What is SEO?

If you are asking these questions, you are in the right place. In today’s digital world, every business, in both B2B and B2C, is asking the same questions (or they should be).

In short, SEO determines the organic visibility of a business online to its potential customers. Therefore, it is a crucial element of every digital strategy. This piece helps you to understand the importance of SEO in digital marketing and strategy, how to maximise its benefits for your business and look into the SEO strategies your competitors may already be using. SEO is just one part of the bigger digital picture but can have huge benefits when incorporated into your online strategy.

What is SEO, and what is its role in online marketing?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results. Both use keywords to identify potential customers and relevant traffic but in different ways. It is a business’s effort to make its content visible to both bots and humans online.

Bots are programs that scroll the internet to find and show the most relevant content for internet users’ using keywords on Google, Bing, and other search engines. Understanding how they choose and list one website over another gives you the chance to optimise your content to meet the criteria best and in turn, get your business in front of warm leads and potential sales.

SEO identifies the factors that determine whether your content will list on a SERP (search engine result page). It also establishes the best search engine optimisation strategies you should use for your website to list and rank higher.

SEO makes possible laser-sharp targeting of your audience, which will help you achieve 3 key desired outcomes:

1. Get More Leads With SEO

SEO enables you to create the most significant impact for your products or services by showing them to those who need them the most. Potential customers who are aware of what they need and are actively searching for a solution (warm leads) need to find your product or service easily through search engines.

Knowing what your most interested prospects need and what keywords they use when searching for this is critical for successful search engine optimisation. This is done with dedicated SEO software and SEO specialists who can effectively analyse the related data and pick the right keywords to incorporate into your SEO strategy.

Specifically, using the right keywords will help Google’s or any search engines algorithm choose your page over your competitors. As a result, your page will rank higher, and visitors will stay longer, be more engaged with your content, and be more likely to convert into leads.

2. Increase Your Sales With SEO

SEO is the best way to get in front of customers who are already aware they need a solution and also know what they need to achieve their goals but are not yet aware of your business or offering. This type of customer is much further down the marketing funnel as they are seeking a business that can help them, SEO makes it easy to get in front of this customer at the point they are seeking out their solution.

In turn, getting your content in front of this aware audience with the right keywords will also increase your click-through rate (CTR). This means that visitors will be more likely to click through to your other pages and, importantly, to your offerings.

3. SEO Continually Generates Traffic

SEO helps with visibility in search engines based on targeted keywords, which puts your business in front of potential customers specifically searching for your products or services. It also helps increase website traffic at a lower cost (it’s not a physical cost, but you have to factor in time and effort).

When your content is the best match for the keywords visitors search for, and your page delivers the best user experience (UX) too, keeping them on your page for longer, search engines will see this content as valuable for their users.

How SEO works — 3 types of SEO for your online success

Implementing even just one of the below SEO strategies can considerably impact the results you can achieve with your digital marketing.

1. On-Page SEO

This is the list of strategies you can use directly on your websites, such as your overall site content, title tags and media tags, H tag optimisation, internal links, image optimisation, and more. The clearer the picture you give search engines to understand what your content is about and its value to your customers, the more they will show your content in SERPs for all the benefits we listed above.

2. Off-Page SEO

This is about everything else you can do that happens outside of your website, but which can and will influence how both search engines and prospects will see and value your content. This list includes link building with valued sources, creating a strategic long-term content marketing framework and more.

For this type of SEO, it is important to know that the more relevant your linking sources are and the higher their domain authority is, the better this will reflect on your business, resulting in a higher ranking on SERP’s. It is also important to mention that your content marketing will be the driving force behind organic traffic. 

3. Technical SEO

Your website will first have to be highly functional for search engines to index it for any of the above to happen. Key aspects to consider for this are as follows, with site speed highly leading the list: loading speed (less than 4 seconds!), structured data, canonicalisations, sitemaps, and more. 

Everything from plugins and theme elements, right down to the quality of service of your hosting provider, all are important factors to consider for speed. So are URL formats, any broken links, external or internal links, your different navigation menus, CTA and other access buttons, and social links.

Anything and everything that can affect your website’s smooth and high performance will affect if and how your website will rank in SERPs and how visitors will want to consume and interact with your content.

Working with an agency that has a development team that is proficient in SEO practices to ensure code and applications are compliant with what search engines expect to see is also highly important for ranking.

Overview — long-term benefits of SEO

Managing your constant presence online and ensuring that you provide the best functionality and value to your visitors has to be an important part of your digital strategy. This is not only for brand awareness; it will also directly affect the customer experience and user experience, and with this, your revenue and profits. As mentioned earlier SEO is a sustainable option, it enables you to gain organic traffic that can sustain a business when marketing spend is cut back.

Although SEO is great for generating traffic to your site, your landing pages and user journey on your website is a key part of making all the SEO work successful. SEO should definitely be within your digital strategy but it is only the beginning of seeing genuine results online.

Get in touch with our specialist team for a free consultation. They will evaluate and advise the best digital options tailored to your business and goals, and they will help you understand the best easy to implement digital strategies such as SEO.

Get in touch with the Rawnet Team today!