SEO is marketing in a purely digital form. The objective for SEO is to make web pages as easy for search engines to “crawl” as possible. This will likely help the website’s visibility in the search results, resulting in a higher chance of reaching customers.
SEO is a major tool for businesses to master. According to Shopify, 59% of shoppers use the internet to research potential purchases made online or in-store. This is a big margin of potential customers. If businesses’ sites are not well maintained they may be missing out on this, despite their product’s quality. If a business doesn’t have enough exposure, the customers won’t make the discovery of that business.
Like we have already discussed in class, there are three types of SEO marketing: On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and Technical SEO. On-page SEO involves most of the activity of the three. It involves optimizing the content of the site. This includes captions, images, videos, and text, to allow potential customers and search engines to understand the purpose of the site.
Off-page SEO generally involves attempting to get other sites to embed links to your site. The better the quality backlinks, the more authority your site will have. It is optimal to have many backlinks. The more backlinks the site has, the more authoritative search engines will deem your website.
Technical SEO involves making changes to the website itself in order to make it run more efficiently. It ensures the website is fast, crawlable, and user friendly.
SEO also has four marketing tactics that are used to gain authority: Keyword research, Competitive analysis, active link building, and image optimization. Keyword research involves finding out what key words your target customers are using to find the product. You can do this by using tools on Google like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or Moz. This will in turn lead to heavier traffic on the site. In addition, competitive analysis is the next step where a business must analyze its competitors. The business should start by finding the competitor’s best pages and figure out where the traffic is coming from. This may strike some ideas for the business’s own site as it builds its online authority. Next, Active link building takes time but can generate an authoritative website through backlinking. You must build relationships with other online businesses, and this will require putting yourself out there. You will have to pitch your ideas/business to others in hopes they will link you to their site. Over time, the links you build will add credibility to your site. Lastly, is image optimization. Images are important for adding another form of information on your site. It is important that target keywords are included in the image files. This will allow the search engines to deem the pictures relevant or not. It is also important to make sure the files are the right size and format. This will affect the loading time which affects the experience of the users.
What Is SEO Marketing? Definition, Importance and Types (2023) (shopify.com)
2 Responses
This is a really nice overview of the discipline of SEO. I appreciated your addition of statistics to back the importance of SEO today, and I thought that your breakdown of the 4 marketing tactics was well done!
Yeah, you can have the best product in the world, but if your business is not coming up on Google. Then it is really dang hard to sell it. As we were talking about in class. Setting up your website for keywords is a great and easy way to start getting more traffic. 59% is actually not as bad as I thought it would be. But imagine if it was 90%. Shopify is already a powerhouse in its industry but if it could help users more with SEO, it would be even more popular.