Search Engine Optimization
I have heard a lot of marketing acronyms during my time at Western Washington University. ROI, B2B, B2C, CRM, CMS, MAP, PPC, CPC but the one that I hear the most in digital marketing is SEO or Search Engine Optimization. If you are new to this topic you should check out the resources from MOZ, their beginners-guide-to-SEO got me started, here’s what I learned:
First I learned some SEO Basics, SEO is a way to increase the quantity and quality of the traffic that you receive on your website. You increase the traffic by increasing the “organic” search results, basically when someone googles your business or business category your site shows up! SEO is important because it gains way more attention than the PPC strategies. MOZ says: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunities than PPC on both mobile and desktop.
Second I learned How Search Engines Work. It turns out it’s a three-step process that involves Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking. In the first step Crawl, the search engine looks through all the URLs for code/content. The search engine does this by sending out crawlers or spiders they detect content through links and the index it. That brings us to the second step which is indexing. A search engine index is just a large database of information that the spiders have gathered in the index it is organized into groups so it can be served up at the right time to the right consumer who is searching for it. The last step is ranking, in this step the search engine tries to put the most relevant search results at the top. All this is an attempt to make searching easier and more satisfying for customers.
This is more about knowing your audience than anything else. In order to have relevant information on your website, you need to know what your audience is searching for. For example, I work in the ski industry and some keywords for my shop might be, ski wax, ski rental, skiing. If I wanted to do research on one of those, I should dive deeper into what, when, why, who and where this search is usually coming from. You can use a keyword research tool to find out average search volume, related keywords and a whole lot of other information on keywords you are interested in.
Use what you learned in your keyword research to make groups of keywords that are related. Now you should create pages based on those keyword groups. The best way to improve SEO using your pages is to create content that is answering your audiences’ questions. When creating this content, you want to make sure it is adding some unique value that differentiates your page from others that already exist. Another helpful hint and another acronym are (NAP) or name, address, phone number. If you are a local business including NAP consistently on your site is crucial to help your business appear on geographically focused searches.
Link building is a crucial part of SEO, in fact, Google ranked it as one of the top three most important ranking factors that they judge websites with. Inbound links are the ones that most people will be familiar with, these are the links that take you from one website to another. Linking trusted websites that are related to the content you are posting can increase consumer trust and bolster your own authority. Internal links on the other hand point to different pages that are within the same website. This can also help with SEO because if a lot of internal links are going to one page it tells the search engine that is an important page so it will be ranked higher. Google put out a great acronym to help guide you with link building and all other facets of SEO, E-A-T. The E stands for Expert, the A authoritative, and T trustworthy. You should always strive to accomplish EAT with all your SEO objectives.
SEO is a field that is constantly changing, a lot of this change comes as a result of trying to make searching a more enjoyable experience for users. Here are some of the more important trends and changes to SEO to be aware of in 2019.
1. Googles mobile-first ranking.
Traditionally Google has used desktop websites to index and rank, but in March of 2018, they announced that they will begin migrating sites to be ranked on a mobile-first system. This means that while your desktop website is still important you should be focusing more heavily on your audience’s mobile experience now to improve SEO.
2. Page Speed.
While this has always been a factor in Google's ranking in July 2018 they included the speed of mobile webpages to the ranking criteria as well. Not only do your webpages need to load correctly but they need to do it fast.
Once Google has established your brand name as its own entity, it will begin to crawl through the content online and look for unlinked brand mentions. Essentially the more unlinked brand mentions that you have the higher Google will rank your website. The other aspect to this is that the more credible the sites that mention you the more value that the mention holds.
4. GDPR.
General Data Protection Regulation, these are laws that passed in the European Union to protect consumer's data. International companies should adhere to all GDPR guidelines.
Now that you know how important SEO is for your digital marketing campaigns, get out there and make it happen!