If you’re not getting a ton of hits on your website or traffic through the door, you may need to step up your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. No idea what SEO is? No problem. In this blog, we will cover what SEO is in digital marketing, and what the contribution of an SEO specialist actually is. Search engine optimization and marketing can be revolutionary to your business, so listen up and see why quality SEO experts are essential for a growing business.
Digital marketing is a requirement of any business or organization that wants to get noticed by today’s consumers. It offers a world of possibilities when it comes to career choices spanning a wide variety of skill sets. One of the most sought-after skills in digital marketing is search engine optimization. With SEO, your business can boost brand awareness, drive traffic, increase sales, and become an authority in its field; but how do SEO specialists accomplish such a feat? There is no simple explanation, but we will look at the most factors for a successful SEO strategy to get a better understanding.
Search Engine Optimization Overview
There are three types of SEO, and any SEO specialist that is worth hiring will approach all three in conjunction, according to the needs of your business and site. The three components of search engine optimization play very different roles and there is a preferred order that they are approached in.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the base of most quality SEO strategies, as it takes a look at the website itself to ensure that your site structure and bases are set up for success. Variables within technical SEO are your website’s meta tags, descriptions, internal linking, content mapping, and even your web design. Numerous factors play into the Google algorithm for search results, so numerous factors must be optimized for the highest chance of success.
When a site is optimized as a whole, meaning the meta titles and descriptions are meticulously written, the design meets modern standards (and more), your site loads fast, and on par with other websites. Google and other search engines look at the quality of a site as much as the content, so starting with technical SEO will ensure that all major changes are made before you actually start targeting keywords.
On-Page Search Engine Optimization
Technical SEO will affect your ability to rank, but your on-page SEO will determine what you will eventually rank for. Most SEO specialists skim over the on-page of a site and move directly into off-page SEO, but that can make the difference between ranking for a few keywords and a few hundred keywords when you look at long-term results.
Search engines want to rank the most relevant, informative, and authoritative pages, which means your content has to be above reproach. Content creation isn’t always part of the job description, but a good SEO manager can create content that is already completely optimized for your website. After that, the implementation is just as important. Part of an SEO specialist’s job is to identify trends among competitors and ensure that your web pages have similar attributes. The vast majority of pages lack something that search engines are looking for, and quality on-page SEO will identify these factors and hit them all.
Off-Page Optimization
When it comes to off-page SEO, link building is the primary focus. There are endless olive branches of links that you can acquire to help your SEO strategy, but the key is to go for quality backlinks that have domain authority and monthly traffic. Major search engines look for strong “signals”, or combinations of keywords and backlinks to rank pages in the search results, so the stronger authority you have the better chance of ranking you have.
