SEO has quickly matured from what was often initially perceived as Internet hocus-pocus into a necessary and measurable strategy in successful marketing and advertising. Television might still reign supreme as far as revenue, but there’s an increasingly strong argument to be made that digital/online marketing now has a much farther reach. Smartphone ownership continues to grow, thus expanding online marketing opportunities. Conversely, digital video recording devices have made commercial ads slightly less attractive, prompting many to skip over them entirely. As such, having a bird’s eye perspective on the elements affecting SEO are critical to successfully capitalizing on a campaign.
Laying the Foundation with Strong Web Design
The basic starting point of any successful SEO campaign is intentional web design and development. If the website isn’t created in a way so as to be attractive to the various search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., any attempts to gain traction with an SEO campaign will be met with a lot of wheel-spinning, rather than forward progress. This is one of the key values in utilizing the services of a professional web design agency.
Keyword Research and Analysis
While the website development phase progresses, an SEO professional should conduct research to determine what words people are using in their searches to find the products or services similar to those the website is offering. These words, or groupings of words, are called keywords and play a significant role in an SEO campaign. Once the target groups of keywords are determined, these words are inserted in behind-the-scenes website page descriptions, (meta description tags), and strategically placed in the website’s content.
Leverage your Blog for Brand Equity & Loyalty
There are a few basic guidelines to follow when it comes to SEO web design, but new studies and research are shedding light onto areas that might have gone more overlooked in recent years. Among those competing for attention online, most have a basic understanding that blogging can help increase website traffic and visibility. In fact, it’s estimated that blogging alone can increase web traffic by 55% for brands. While many are quick to dismiss the idea of adding a blog to their site, they usually do so at their own expense. Blogging is a brand’s unencumbered opportunity to express itself. It is a platform to relate to their clients and not only share the brand’s unique offerings, but also the distinctive values that set the brand apart from its competitors. Coupled with the ability to share the content across social media forums, this makes blogging a powerful vehicle to develop incredible brand equity and loyalty.
Promoting your Content
Creating great content is a huge part of SEO success, but according to the SEO experts at Search Engine Land, it’s only half the battle. Once you have great, optimized content designed to appeal to the targeted audience, the content must be successfully promoted to help drive traffic. The Search Engine Land’s team looked at one recent study that revealed how an incredibly disproportionate amount of leads from blog posts on the HubSpot website came from very few actual posts overall. According to the study, almost half (46%) of all leads came from the top 30 blog posts (0.5%). The other 6,000 pieces of content (5,970 to be exact) accounted for just over half themselves (54%). This highlights the powerful synergy of quality content and effective promotion.
To further understand the importance of a successful SEO campaign, it is helpful to know what a site’s content is competing against. Every day, there are about 27 million pieces of content shared online. As such, creating and having quality content on a website must be coupled with a comprehensive promotion strategy to really achieve efficiency and success. Today, we know that approximately 90% of users never scroll past the first page of search results. If a site or content isn’t appearing there, it only has a 10% chance of getting noticed in searches.
Enlist the Help of Pros
As the structure and rules of the Internet become more and more defined, it will continue to be vitally important for brands and businesses to form strong partnerships with SEO experts. With billions of pieces of content being put forth on the Internet every year, the best content means little if no one sees it. Proven SEO experts can not only provide the education and guidance necessary for creating great content, but also possess the skills to promote the content. In order to be part of a successful SEO campaign, make sure your plan addresses both.