Any good inbound marketing strategy has several aspects that can never be ignored: content creation, email campaigns, case studies. Another must-have is search engine optimization (SEO).
While campaigns and content creation stay relatively the same, SEO is an ever-evolving beast that requires more maintenance to be effective. Here's what you need to know to start and a few things to avoid as you create your digital marketing strategy.
SEO is a method to ensure your website and its content appear on search engine results pages (SERPs). It involves adding words and phrases people are searching for to find your content, and it helps boost organic traffic.
Google is by far the most popular search engine, which makes it the typical focus when most marketers are in the process of optimizing. While the concept of SEO is fairly straightforward, its implementation can get rather complicated.
Complicated or not, SEO is something even the smallest companies need to make a blip on Google's radar. Search engines are the greatest generator of website traffic, with recent studies reporting that around 50% of all web traffic comes from organic search results.
The percentage is significant, especially compared to the 8% of traffic from social media and the 27% from paid searches. Organic traffic is even higher for B2B companies, topping off at nearly 70%.
If your company is missing the mark with SEO, you're also missing out on a massive amount of pageviews and potential customers.
Keywords are an important part of SEO, but they aren’t necessarily king. The rest of your SEO practices need to back up your keywords to prove your content is relevant and useful — not just stuffed with keywords for the sake of being found.
Start with keyword research related to your products and services, as well as those used by your competitors. Use keywords in the most important parts of every webpages: page title, meta description, header tags, URL, and text that links to other pages throughout your site.
User intent now plays a crucial role in keyword strategy. Focus on understanding what users are actually looking for when they search specific terms, and create content that addresses those needs directly.
The type of content you produce plays a major role in your SEO. Content on your website, social media channels, and elsewhere needs to be relevant and provide value to the consumer. Valuable content is well-produced, helpful, and something people actually want to read or view.
Creating content with a human audience in mind, rather than writing for a search engine, will win out every time. Consider publishing a regular lineup of evergreen content or more thoughtful, insightful content that remains relevant and useful for the long haul.
Long-form content tends to rank better on search engines, but be careful: Writing longer for the sake of SEO could work against you if you start to keyword-stuff.
Content depth and expertise have become increasingly important, with search engines now prioritizing content that demonstrates E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Another way to think about it: If YOU were your target audience, what content would be most helpful for you?
Providing a streamlined, enjoyable user experience is another way to boost SEO. The best user experience comes from websites that are easy to navigate and search, offer related content as well as relevant internal and external links. Quick load times enhance the user experience, as does having a responsive site design that can be viewed on any screen size or device.
Page experience signals like Core Web Vitals (loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability) have become crucial ranking factors. Ensuring your site meets these technical benchmarks is now essential for strong SEO performance.
Even if you can't address every single thing both human viewers and search engines love, you want to make sure you steer clear of practices both of them tend to hate. Search engines, especially, are not fans of:
When in doubt, tools like SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs can help you perform keyword research on your site and your competitor’s sites. HubSpot also features the SEO Marketing Software tool that will help you optimize your SEO within your CRM.
While there are many strategic tips and hints for effective SEO, one of them is to use common sense. If you create awesome content that provides value, contains relevant words your audience is looking for, and appears on a fast-loading, easy-to-navigate site, you've already covered several bases of SEO.
Mobile-first indexing means Google primarily uses the mobile version of content for indexing and ranking. Ensure your site is fully optimized for mobile users, as this is now the standard rather than an option.
If you don't have the capacity to start optimizing your site's SEO, reach out to Lynton for an SEO audit today. We'll provide recommendations for improvement and content ideas.