Where does SEO fit into your digital marketing plans? Gwen Beren explains why SEO is important to get the right kind of traffic to your web properties and how it works seamlessly with other digital marketing campaigns.
Why is SEO Important in Digital Marketing Strategies? (Transcription)
Gwen Beren :
Today we’re going to talk about why SEO is important in digital marketing. This is a common question with so many facets of digital marketing.
There are a lot of words that get thrown around, social media marketing, content marketing, digital PR, search engine optimization, website development, branding, all of these different things. And they really all work together and SEO plays an important role in tying all of those things together.
SEO Helps to Drive Organic Traffic
So the top thing that I like to address is that SEO really helps to drive that organic traffic from your ideal target audience, from their web browsers or their search engines to your website and your web properties. This can help with increasing your brand awareness. It can help with your client acquisition. It can also help with your client retention if it’s done properly. So SEO and digital marketing really go hand in hand.
And the content that you create not only can be optimized for those keywords but can also be used on your social media channels. It can bring awareness through your social media channels based on the topics that you choose to write on. And placing all of your keywords and using them in a thoughtful and strategic way is going to be the difference between creating content that might not be interesting to anyone, and creating content that the search engines pick up and help to increase your authority and your trust, not only with the search engines but with your ideal target audience.
So let me give you an example. An example would be trying to make up a word for something that you want to be known as. You want to be known as the master of everything digital marketing. Well, probably nobody is searching for a master of digital marketing, and please feel free to try to prove me wrong there. But if you are trying to optimize for something that nobody is searching for it’s unlikely that you are going to get any traffic. So what you want to do is look for keywords that are more relevant and speak more clearly to your audience, like in my case maybe SEO expert instead of a master of digital marketing, SEO expert really focuses more on what I do, and there are a lot of searches for that term. So I could write an article talking about how I developed my SEO expertise and how I continue to make sure that I stay up to date with all of everything new in the SEO world to make sure that my expertise is up to date.
SEO Guides You in Creating Content
Similar things are available across all different kinds of industries. In the legal industry talking about new regulations, new laws, talking about the impact that you foresee those things happening, or the impact that you foresee the regulations having on what the outcomes will be. So it’s very important to come up with a strategy that combines both your expertise, what your target audience is looking for, and what the search engines want to see when people are searching for those things.
So in that way SEO is extremely important to your digital marketing campaigns because oftentimes you’re developing campaigns from the creative side of things where you’re thinking, oh I think our audience would really love to see this, and that is a wonderful place to start. But then once you come up with that really great idea then you can take it and see, okay, how many searches are done for this term, what are some variations of this term? What are some related topics and who else is talking about this? And then where can we publish that content once we create it, so that’s how SEO factors into your digital marketing. It lends the data to your creativity.
ROI for SEO Over Paid Channels
It can also help you with other added benefits along the lines of compliance, and compliance can vary from area to area or country to country. Here in the United States, we have ADA compliance, in California, we have CCPA in the EU they have GDPR. So those are all things also that an SEO can help you look at as far as image compliance, information hierarchy, your user experience, the contrast on your website, all of those things are things that a qualified SEO should be able to inform you on so that not only are you coming up where you want to come up, but you’re also compliant while you’re doing it. And for many, many businesses, hopefully, for all businesses, compliance is very important for the longevity of your business. Especially if you’re in business for the long term, SEO and compliance are going to be your best practices and ultimately have the most ROI long term for you overpaid channels, where I always liken paid advertising is like renting an audience, whereas SEO is building a relationship to own your audience.
So if you have any further questions or if you have any comments on why SEO is important in digital marketing please include them in the comments below, I’d love to hear what you have to say. Again, this is Gwen Beren, CEO of Illuminuos Marketing, and thank you so much. Hopefully, this was helpful.
