SEO For A Beginner Digital Marketer

Seo For A Beginner Digital Marketer

Search engine optimization (SEO) is often thought of as synonymous with digital marketing. However, SEO is a subset of digital marketing. Digital marketing as a whole involves email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, the list is practically endless.

SEO and digital marketing have a peculiar relationship. Think of SEO as the connector of your digital marketing efforts and your target audience.

Let’s say you have an eCommerce store loaded with excellent products, detailed product reviews, and a neat landing page. How will a search engine discover these to show to your target audience?

Enter SEO. Advertisement

Optimizing your eCommerce store to enable search engines to find, crawl, and index it, will bring you consistently healthy traffic, thereby helping your revenues and consequently profits grow.

To help you understand the fundamentals of the relationship between SEO and digital marketing, we will segment our discussion under 3 heads:

• 3 Types of SEO that digital marketers use
• Benefits of SEO for digital marketers
• SEO Tools for digital marketers 

1. 3 Types of SEO that digital marketers use

To achieve a better position on the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), you will need to implement all of the following 3 types of SEO:

• On-page SEO: This is usually the type most beginners are familiar with. On-page SEO involves researching a set of target keywords that you will use in your website content. 

• Off-page SEO: This type of SEO is where you build stronger relationships with other websites, particularly by building backlinks. A backlink is a link on another (preferably very popular) website that links back to your website. 

• Technical SEO: As the name suggests, this is a more technical approach to SEO which involves things like site architecture, site speed, structured data, crawlability, indexing, among other things. 

As a beginner, it’s best to collaborate with an SEO specialist who has the technical skills and experience to perform SEO for you.

2. Benefits of SEO for digital marketers

Google has years of experience providing extremely relevant search results to users. Therefore, most SEO tactics will in effect make your website a lot more valuable for the users.

Following are the benefits of SEO for digital marketers:

• Faster load times - Lower bounce rate

I mentioned site speed under the head ‘Technical SEO’. Site speed is critical to the success of your SEO efforts because slow lead times are often a turn off for users. Users don’t like waiting while your page leisurely takes 5 odd seconds to load, they ‘bounce’ without ever looking at your content.

Google doesn’t like that its users have to experience this inconvenience, so it will rank websites that load quickly, higher up in the SERPs. Through this SEO tactic (i.e. maximizing site speed), digital marketers aim to minimize the load times so they can rank better and reduce the bounce rate. A low bounce rate tells you that the users are not abandoning your website without taking any action.

• A responsive website for enhanced user experience

A responsive website is one that works on all devices. For example, a lot of your users may be trying to look at your content via a mobile device. If the website is not responsive, the user may not be able to view the content properly, and will likely leave your website very quickly.

When a website is responsive, it looks at the device the user is on and accordingly adapts its appearance. This encourages the users to explore more products or services on your website without the hassle of dealing with the website’s disproportionate appearance.

• Healthy traffic with high-quality content

The end-goal for Google, as we discussed, is providing the users with relevant, high-quality content. I always ask my readers to put emphasis on providing value through high-quality content, because that is the best SEO strategy you can implement.

In fact, even Google always highlights how it aims to rank value-driven websites higher up in the SERPs. When you use high-quality content as part of your SEO strategy, you will be able to build healthy traffic that will keep growing over time, contributing to your website’s revenue.

• Finally – Inbound leads

Digital marketers love inbound leads. These are hot leads ready to be closed. When all your SEO tactics work, and you manage to rank in the first few SERPs, you will start to get a ton of inbound leads.

These leads are already looking for your product. All you need to do now is seal the deal. When you ace the SEO game, inbound leads will flood your website so you can laugh your way to the bank and get your hands on all of that fat revenue you just made.

3. SEO tools for digital marketers

There are countless SEO tools in the market, all eager to snatch your money away at the click of a button. But, not all of these tools are worth your time and investment. Focus on all-inclusive SEO tools that will offer the following:

• Keyword research
• Competitive analysis
• Backlink analysis
• SERP tracking
• Technical SEO audit

Following are the most popular SEO tools (listed in preferential order) that will offer all of the above-mentioned capabilities:

• SEMrush
• Ahrefs
• HubSpot
• Serpstat
• Mangools

All of these tools have their own strengths. For example, if you are aiming to boost conversion rates, SEMrush or HubSpot would be your best bet. If you want to go heavy on backlink analysis, go with Ahrefs. If you want a top-notch keyword research tool, consider Mangools. But, if you are a beginner on a thin budget, Serpstat will offer you ample reliability at a price that won’t break your bank.

Final Thoughts

Digital marketing has a broader scope than SEO. SEO is and will remain an integral part of digital marketing. As a beginner, you must first focus on understanding the basics of SEO and the benefits it will offer in your digital marketing efforts, and then get your hands dirty with some SEO tools so you can see how things work in real-time.

As you gain experience, you will realize that SEO is dynamic. Google is paying its employees an unbelievable amount of salary, just to deliver relevant results to its users. Therefore, the SEO tactics you use will need to adapt to the continuous changes in Google’s algorithm. Remember, there are no shortcuts for SEO.