Why Use SEO in Your Marketing Strategy

Internet marketing is a crucial element of your business. It is a multidisciplinary field where complex skills and brilliant execution of strategies come full circle. Digital marketing should be your business’ primary marketing channel and SEO (search engine optimization) your best practice.

Businesses today use SEO but fail to understand the real value it brings. As a result, they fail to execute the practice effectively and forget to follow through. SEO does improve a website’s ranking, searchability, and visibility. But the true power of SEO is more than that.

Understanding the value of SEO and getting clarity about why it is extremely important to use in your marketing strategy is key to executing SEO best practices. If you want to take your brand or business to the next level, read the important reasons below about why you need to use SEO in your marketing strategy, and employ the best practices.

SEO INCREASES QUALITY TRAFFIC

One of the most important goals of SEO is to increase traffic to your brand, digital properties, or website. It’s also what it’s more commonly known for—at least for the majority who doesn’t quite understand yet the full spectrum of the SEO’s value.

Traffic gets you clicks, visits, and eventually a conversion. But as you already know, that’s not always the case. Traffic is just one part of the equation—not the ultimate objective. What SEO does is not just increase traffic, but it targets quality traffic.

One of SEO’s biggest advantages is that it’s an inbound marketing strategy. Inbound marketing is more customer-centric compared to a marketer-centric approach to outbound marketing.

Interrupting your audiences while they’re enjoying their favourite show or video, sending out SPAM or cold emails, cold calling, all these are traditional marketing methods. This is downright annoying to your audience.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, creates helpful and relevant resources at the same time making the information easily accessible. This method makes it easier and more convenient for your audience to find you when they need information. For example, when they’re looking for information about a specific type of product or researching your specific industry, they’ll be able to find you on their own.

This is quality traffic.

According to HubSpot’s latest State of Inbound results, 59% of marketers believe that inbound practices generate the highest quality traffic and leads for their sales organizations. Consequently, inbound practices result in higher conversion rates.

How exactly does SEO do this?

That brings us to our next reason: search ranking.

THE GOAL IS TO BE ON PAGE 1 AND IN THE TOP 3 RESULTS

The bread and butter of every digital marketing strategy is search ranking. Organic search remains to be an enormous part of a website’s performance. It translates quality traffic into conversion or engagement.

Google has to be your best friend.

And all the other search engines as well. An effective SEO strategy should land your website on Google’s (and other search engines’) page 1 and in its top 3 results. If you’re best friends with Google, you’ll be treated extremely well by putting you on top of their search ranking.

How do you do this?

You can start with the fundamentals, such as:

• Focus keywords on pages, titles, headers, content
• Captioning images
• Employ quality internal links from other popular pages within your website
• Pursuing inbound links from other websites
• Creating new content and revising it over time

A lot of businesses think that utilizing keywords in their websites and page content is enough. Effective SEO best practices will tell you otherwise. Keywords alone won’t get you on top of every Google search result, or any other search engine results for that matter.

You have to be a lot more creative in employing keywords within your website. Explore other alternatives that support SEO keywords on your website. The key is to strike a balance between your SEO strategy and your page design. Don’t overstuff your website with keywords. Some of the best practices that will help you naturally achieve this are the following:

• Revise your content headlines or headers with helpful and relevant keywords
• Utilize H1 tags
• Add and/or update your images’ alt text
• Rename your images
• Add more words to thin pages or pages with few words
• Update, update, update

Again, SEO is not a one-time marketing initiative. If you want your website to be on page 1 and in the top 3 of the search results, you’ll have to put in place SEO as a continuous and evolving inbound marketing strategy. The execution should be consistent and fresh to maintain relevance.

Another methodology today that’s becoming aggressively adopted is the concept of local SEO. It allows small and medium businesses to focus their optimizations on specific locations, such as states, provinces, regions, cities, towns. This proves to be effective and successful since it enables small and medium business owners to establish their brand at a local level.

Utilize local SEO on your website to boost traffic and increase engagement and/or conversions. Focus optimization of your website’s Google Knowledge Graph panel, My Business listing, and social media. A strong focus on positive user reviews also helps strengthen your brand’s credibility and trust.

SEO IS MORE COST-EFFECTIVE

The great thing about SEO is it’s an investment and not purely a marketing cost. Unlike spending money on paid ads or PPC, SEO is a long-term marketing strategy. It can have an immediate impact and the impact can sustain for several years.

SEO is not cheap. That’s one thing you need to keep in mind. It’s a cost-effective model where you’ll have to continuously evolve, adapt to trends, and update. Cheap SEO strategies don’t work. Again, just keywords don’t do the trick.

What makes SEO more cost-effective is you won’t have to spend a lot of money on a marketing campaign that’s designed to knock on every audience’s door. Whether you’re writing high-quality content yourself and applying SEO best practices yourself or you’re hiring a digital marketing agency to do it for you, SEO will take care of attracting traffic to you.

Imagine paying the average cost per click (CPC) of $2.32 versus spending on a long-term, more effective SEO strategy. Your valuable spot in the Google search results is actually free of charge, unlike PPC ads where you’ll have to spend money for every user click or page visit.

SEO CAN GET YOU AHEAD OF THE COMPETITION

There’s a multitude of ways of how SEO can move you ahead of the competition. It’s now a staple in any digital marketing strategy. The objective is to improve SEO and more importantly, prioritize online presence improvement. If this is not yet your priority, then you’re losing out to your competitors.

You can be creative with how you implement SEO in your marketing strategy to stay on top of the game. Below are reasons on how SEO can get you ahead of your competition.

• Use SEO and PR together to maximize search results. While SEO and PR may look like two separate marketing strategies, it doesn’t mean that they can’t be used together. Using them together can bring enormous results. 

The secret lies behind link building. Link building allows you to find new ways to put your brand in front of audiences, making it more effective to distribute your content to potential clients or customers.

• Achieve a much better user experience. Part of what makes a website land in the top search results is an excellent user experience. If your audience can’t find what they’re looking for on your website, then that’s going to be a problem. 

Google has put in place a more intuitive AI that can now interpret user experience. Positive user experience translates to more success of a website. The fewer clicks and the faster a user can get to accurate results, the better.

• SEO is measurable. What makes SEO measurable is the existence of tracking and analytics involved. It’s true that it doesn’t present data a lot more straightforwardly compared to ROI calculations on paid ads. 

However, the correlation of the data and analysis to its impact at the back end provides valuable insights and understanding of how SEO impacts your website’s performance and conversions. There’s a lot of data that you can take advantage of as well as utilize to come up with continuous improvement efforts. 

• Stay relevant and fresh. The search world evolves phenomenally fast. Google dictates these changes and it’s up to businesses to stay on top of these updates. If you don’t keep up with the evolution, it’s going to be difficult for your brand to stay relevant. The best SEO practice is to remain updated with fresh tactics on your website and your entire digital properties to keep its spot on the 1st page and the top 3 results.

Whether you’ve used SEO or still about to use it in your marketing strategy, you have to understand how it works, how to use it, and the value it can bring to your brand or your business. Quality SEO translates to success. It’s the perfect marketing technique today that can outsmart and beat out traditional marketing strategies. If you want to put your brand or business on the map and become a ‘household name’ of search results, you must use SEO as a priority in your marketing strategy. Variance Marketing can help you achieve your success through SEO services in Toronto and beyond.