Search engines such as Bing and Google use bots to crawl pages on the web, going from site to site, collecting information about those pages and putting them in an index. Think of the index as a giant library where a librarian can pull up a book (or a web page) to help you find exactly what you’re looking for at the time.
SEO is a significant part of digital marketing because people conduct innumerable searches every year, often with commercial intent to find information about services and products. Search is often the primary source of digital traffic for brands and complements other marketing channels. Ranking higher and greater visibility in search results than your competition can have a material impact on your bottom line.
On-page SEO focuses on optimizing areas of your website that are under your control, such as:
- Keyword strategy
- Metadata
- Quality content creation
- Page speed optimization
Off-page SEO concentrates on increasing your domain’s authority through efforts outside your website, such as:
- Link building
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Paid search marketing
Before we get too overwhelmed with the complex processes, let’s focus on a couple of SEO best practices that should definitely be a part of your 2022 digital marketing strategy, regardless of your budget.
1. Write content for humans first
Writing quality, accurate content at regular intervals should remain an important part of your digital marketing strategy. You should not be stuffing your content with keywords, it should be easy to read for any layman.
2. Concentrate on featured snippets.
Featured snippets are short snippets of text that appear at the top of Google’s search results and answer your search query. If you optimize your content to appear in the featured snippet, you are sure to get a notable boost in your organic click-through rate.
3. Pay attention to user experience.
Optimizing your website for user experience is essential to long-term sustenance online. However, many abstract factors influence this user experience, including a user’s motivations, feelings and values.
4. Focus on technical SEO.
When your website has technical issues, it often results in a poor user experience. You should use a technical SEO checklist to review our client’s websites, focusing on:
- Google’s core web vitals
- Security
- URL structures
- Website architecture, including internal linking
Technical SEO ensures a strong foundation for your website to support your digital marketing efforts in a better manner.
5. Build up your backlinks.
Many companies have embraced the significance of having a content strategy, but this means nothing if no one is linking to your content. When you are looking for link-building opportunities, seek high-authority websites to improve your credibility, ranking and traffic. Backlinks provide tremendous goodwill, building awareness, offering social proof and positioning you as an expert in your space.
The above-listed few practices and a solid SEO strategy can put your brand on the map, and reach the right audience. This will also help with awareness and goodwill of the overall product/service.
