It was a long-held belief that search engine optimization was a separate entity from digital marketing.
SEO was used to optimize websites by making them more easily found through search engines. This typically involved cultivating inbound links and using keyword stuffing to influence search results. Those days are gone, but that doesn’t mean SEO is dead.
Success nowadays is about marrying SEO with well-established digital strategies, while staying abreast of emerging approaches.
It must play a part in every digital outreach platform you employ and it must always be how you measure success of separate strategies.
So, here are five reasons why digital marketing and SEO must be one and the same.
1. Conversational Search Queries
Think of all the ways that customers search online today. They don’t keep it to a single keyword. They’ve been trained to use keyword phrases and conversational search queries.
They use those conversation search queries on Google, Yahoo, Bing and Social Media. It’s those phrases that must be part of your content marketing, social media marketing, video marketing and digital advertising strategies.
The more you use SEO, the more impactful these strategies become because they speak to what customers need, want and are looking for. They might find those answers on social media, through your content or by clicking one of your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
Regardless of how they find you, conversational search queries come from SEO research and using those search queries across all your campaigns is vital to your success.
2. The First Step In Any Digital Approach
SEO must play a part in every digital outreach strategy you employ and therefore must be the all-important first step you take.
It increases the relevance of each of your digital approaches because they’re more in line with how searches are performed. This means using similar keywords and keyword phrases across all your platforms.
SEO helps you with attention-grabbing titles for the videos you post to video-sharing websites like YouTube. It involves generating better content for your audience and it might mean focusing on a unique market niche through social media. It doesn’t happen with guesswork. It only happens with solid research.
3. Mobile-Optimized Websites
More customers search on mobile devices than on laptops. This means the same strategies you employ to drive traffic from laptop and desktop searches must also be used to drive mobile users to mobile-friendly websites. However, while being mobile-friendly is a must, it’s simply not enough.
Mobile users must be diverted to mobile-optimized landing pages. This means all your SEO strategies must be redeployed to make your site more easily found on mobile searches.
4. Local SEO Marketing and Advertising
Google’s constant algorithm changes have forced digital marketing teams to abandon those outdated keyword-stuffing, backlink and black-hat approaches. You can’t influence search results with keywords alone. You can’t grow an audience by just building inbound links.
Something more relevant to today’s audience is needed and when that audience is local, you need to take your SEO to another level entirely.
Local SEO involves generating content for a local audience. It means using optimization to increase targeted traffic with location-based search queries. It means embedding rich snippets on landing pages with HTML coding, pages where users see attention-grabbing headlines and concise, well-written description and reviews on search results.
5. A Commitment To Improving Return On Investment (ROI)
Don’t bother having a digital marketing strategy if you’re not willing to invest the time to improve those strategies.
A comprehensive approach that includes reviewing your website’s analytics, increasing your social media reach, leveraging influencers in your market to build your brand and using SEO to bring all your strategies together will result in more leads generated for every marketing dollar spent.
How to Increase Your Facebook Reach and Outsmart the Algorithm
Being SEO savvy is critical for any digital marketing team looking to grow its digital brand. It helps you reach a broader audience while also helping you to focus on a specific market segment.
Don’t ditch SEO. Embrace it and use it at all times.
Written by: