SEO may seem art, difficult to understand for lot of businesses. However it has become vital to build sound web marketing strategy. It’s a fact that vast majority of consumers start their search for any product or service with search engines. Here comes the role of SEO which is widely accepted as marketing channel among large organizations.
In a survey conducted among 100 top-level marketing directors at global brands, 45% indicated that SEO was most favored marketing medium which was nearer followed by social media at 42%. Such findings not only focus the shift of marketing medium but the way budget priorities are even starting to shift from traditional marketing campaign towards internet marketing.
The survey also describes that 42% responses are targeting customer acquisition in coming six months as compared to just 28% noted in last year. SEO is going to play key role in the context to increasing online sales figures. Despite of such an importance of search in today’s online world, SEO is not adopted by small to mid size business in a manner large business houses have adopted.
A study conducted by digital marketing agency dotdigital revealed that nearly quarter knew very little about this new marketing subject with little surety of benefits. While one fifth even do not bother to spend money on such activity with the reason that they were unable to see any results and few looking internet marketing as strategically important.The main reason why small to mid companies do not appreciate importance of SEO is simply because they are not looking at their online presence and realizing importance of search and search engine rankings. The problem with them lies in the fact that they want to stick with the traditional marketing which is better known and comfortable medium for them. A myth also prevails among such people that SEO is kind of blackhat which has to rely on Google to deliver their promotion messages.
Let us see some facts about how SEO can strengthen your marketing to beat the power of search:
Role of SEO
Search engines work on indexing text and information in form of links and images on web pages. Indexing is commenced by web spiders or crawlers, record the words found on web pages noting how many times they appear, their relevance, number of inbound and outbound links on the web page. The search engine uses this record to weigh the value of each page using algorithm and ranks them accordingly ensuring that web page is as much as relevant to the search.Hence role of SEO marketers is to ensure the brands or products are ranked on top three in the search list or to the extreme rank on the first page of search engine.
The answer is to why small to mid size companies believe that Google is considered as the only platform to deliver marketing message is that Google is number 1 search engine provider controlling 88.9% of market (according to Internet Advertising Bureau).
Developing SEO strategy
SEO should be developed as overall marketing strategy that needs to be addressed while designing the website. SEO principles should be implemented at the time of designing/redesigning of any website. It requires developing clear objectives in the form deliverable of SEO like ‘higher customer conversion rates’ and ‘higher product sales’.
The planning also includes budgeting, forecasting and introduction of analytics packages to measure effectiveness of any campaign. Remember SEO cannot give top rankings in couple of days. First it is required to simply aim to get the same plinth with your rivals with continual improvement work on area where continuous changes are made.
Devise keyword strategy
One of the first thing as a part of planning process is to identify the list of keywords that an organization wish to be associated with. This is required to generate useful rather low value traffic. Keyword strategy is essential that makes marketers to undertake ‘rough’ keyword analysis of their products or services that people are actually searching in their sphere. Once suitable keywords are identified it is time to build business case to understand likely returns on investment once SEO get to know commercial metrics like conversion rate and basket value. Often people surprisingly fail to miss out using precise and correctly spelled keyword spin website content. This is important step to ensure that key basis is covered in your website properly.
Avoid common keyword pitfalls
Often companies start use of brand terms on content with keyword stuffing. When companies intend to use brand names and terms at every possible opportunity then content can end up making no sense to the readers. Hence optimum use of keyword rate is considered to be used not more than 10%-15% of total content. Too much use of keywords may result damaging higher rankings. Another pitfall is actually not using keywords that are used by consumers.
Often organization simply focuses on single inspirational keyword and fails to include keywords that are more likely to generate business. One more consideration that company should take into account is to remain continuously updated on the web. Search engines like Google, Bing are now introducing navigation bars that ranks information based on latest updating.
Link building
Next step is to generate links to encourage inbound and outbound traffic that will result into increased rankings. Link building is particularly essential with specific industry like financial services, retail ranking, entertainment and business that are taken to be associated with frequently used “bingo”. Remember that your website is optimized to its extreme but if you do not have any links to your site to back up then being optimized is of no meaning. The way out to get back links to your website is placing links to third party websites of your niche. Social media marketing is the essential way to place links of your website as long as niche has suitable contacts set in the first time or created user communities of social media.
If social media seems to be difficult option then it might be necessary to develop one using communicating with bloggers, social bookmarking websites, distributing press releases on Twitter. It does not make sense simply jumping to any agency that guarantees you to provide thousands of links each day, this is because they lack relevancy that not only value generated links low to the web crawlers but essentially drop down your rankings.
Again repeating the sentence, search engine may seem difficult marketing tool but it is vital issue essential to build sound web marketing strategy. Explore the
power of search with SEO marketing!!!
2 Comments