What Is the Role of SEO in Digital Marketing?

Updated by Jo Cameron. November 8, 2024

SEO involves optimizing a website to improve its ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs), which can help increase your reach to potential customers and support your wider digital marketing efforts.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an integral part of a business’s digital marketing strategy, but it can sometimes be forgotten about, or put on the back burner, in order to focus on quicker wins and greater revenue-driving initiatives. This is quite common for small to medium businesses that maybe don’t have the resources to invest in a long-term SEO marketing strategy. It can also be quite difficult to convince stakeholders and decision-makers of the importance of SEO because it is not easily tied to specific financial numbers. Additionally, many people might not really understand what SEO is and how it can successfully help a business’s online presence.

Digital marketing involves businesses using digital channels and technologies to promote a product, service, or brand and to ultimately achieve their marketing objectives. Digital marketing is becoming increasingly important for businesses, as more and more consumers take to digital channels to make purchasing decisions. With digital marketing, businesses can reach a wider, and more global audience, target specific markets, e.g. by demographics, track and analyze consumer behavior, and drive greater brand awareness, sales, and revenue.

Such digital marketing techniques include:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO involves optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages, increasing visibility and driving organic traffic to your site.
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC): PPC is a digital advertising model where advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked, allowing for quick visibility and targeted audience reach
• Social Media Marketing (SMM): SMM leverages social media platforms to promote products or services, engage with audiences, and enhance brand awareness through strategic content sharing.
• Content Marketing: Content marketing focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, ultimately driving profitable customer actions.
• Email Marketing: Email marketing involves sending targeted messages to a group of subscribers, fostering relationships, promoting products or services, and encouraging customer loyalty.
• Influencer Marketing: Influencer marketing uses endorsements and product mentions from influencers—individuals with a dedicated social following—to reach a larger audience and build trust in your brand.

And more! Any way you can advertise your business and its products or services through digital channels and technologies constitutes a digital marketing technique or tactic. A successful digital marketing strategy often involves a combination of different types of digital marketing activities to reach and engage with the target audience across multiple channels and touchpoints.

If you’re reading this, you may already know what SEO is, but here’s a quick refresher… SEO is a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results. In other words, SEO is all about optimizing your website’s presence on search engines through various tactics, and because organic search is one of the greatest ways for people to discover your website, a good SEO strategy is necessary in increasing traffic to your website. Optimizing for Google Search is particularly important due to its unique algorithms and dominance in the search market.

SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines. It’s important to understand what people are searching for online, and knowing how to answer their questions will connect you right to them. Knowing your audience’s intent and being able to deliver it in a way that search engine crawlers can find and understand is the sweet spot of SEO.

Search engines are intricate systems designed to explore the vast expanse of the Internet and organize information for users. They employ special bots, known as search crawlers, to inspect every corner of the web, collecting data and indexing web pages. When a user submits a search query, the search engine’s algorithm analyzes the indexed data and returns a list of relevant web pages, ranked by relevance and authority. This process ensures that users receive the most pertinent information quickly and efficiently.

Crawling and Indexing

Crawling and indexing are the foundational steps in the search engine process. Crawling involves sending search bots to discover and scan web pages, capturing their content and structure. Once the pages are crawled, the data is stored in massive databases through a process called indexing. During indexing, the crawled data is analyzed and organized into categories, making it possible for search engines to retrieve and rank relevant web pages when a user submits a search query. Effective crawling and indexing are crucial for ensuring that your website is visible and accessible to search engines.

Ranking and Search Engine Results

Ranking is the process of determining the order in which web pages are displayed in search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines use complex algorithms to evaluate various factors, such as keyword relevance, content quality, user experience, and technical optimization, to determine a web page’s ranking. These algorithms are constantly evolving, incorporating techniques like machine learning and natural language processing to improve the accuracy and relevance of search results. A well-optimized website that meets these criteria is more likely to rank higher, attracting more organic traffic.

Organic and Paid Results

Search engine results pages (SERPs) display both organic and paid results. Organic results are the non-paid listings that appear based on the search engine’s algorithm, while paid results are sponsored listings that appear at the top and bottom of the page. Organic results are determined by factors like content quality, keyword relevance, and user experience, whereas paid results are influenced by the advertiser’s bid and ad relevance. SEO focuses on improving organic search rankings, while search engine marketing (SEM) encompasses both organic and paid search strategies. By leveraging both, businesses can maximize their visibility and reach on search engines.

By following this structured approach, the new sections are seamlessly integrated into the existing article, maintaining consistency in tone, style, and SEO optimization.

If your business does not have a website, there is a high chance that you could be missing out on all the benefits that ranking on search engines can offer your business. If you do own a website, having a distinct online presence offers more opportunities to increase the visibility of your business online, among many other benefits.

The role that SEO has in your business’s digital marketing may include:

Boost your authority and credibility online

SEO can help boost your authority and credibility online, because the higher that your website ranks on search engines, the more trusted your business will seem to both your target audience and search engine crawlers. This can boost brand reputation and encourage visitors to trust and engage with the brand.

Improve organic search rankings

By optimizing your website's content, structure, and technical aspects, SEO helps improve its ranking on search engines. A higher ranking leads to more visibility and traffic, which can translate into more leads and sales. This can be achieved through several tactics, such as keyword research, on-page optimization, technical optimization, and link building.

Gain organic website traffic

SEO can be used as a customer acquisition tool. By conducting effective SEO, you will help to drive traffic to your website, which is done by improving your visibility on search engines, or in other words, your rank position. This traffic can then be leveraged to convert these new visitors into customers, subscribers, or followers.

Enhance user experience

SEO involves optimizing a website's structure, content, and navigation, which can enhance your user's experience. Ensuring your website is accessible is something that is important to search engines, such as Google. There is strong evidence that Google rewards accessibility when ranking websites, and even has its very own Webmaster Guidelines that websites can follow as best practices. By making your website accessible, you are also making sure that everyone on the internet who lands on your website has a decent user experience, including people who may have particular disabilities. This, in turn, can reduce bounce rates, increase user engagement, and boost conversions.

Surpass your competition

SEO can help your business gain a competitive advantage over your competitors. This can include having more topical content via keyword research, greater website experience through accessibility best practices, ranking in a higher position on the SERP, greater brand awareness, and ultimately more targeted and converting traffic.

Maximize ROI

SEO is a cost-effective digital marketing strategy that can generate a high return on investment (ROI) when done right. SEO provides long-term benefits, as once you achieve a high-ranking position, you can continue to receive leads from it (as long as you’re able to compete for that top position). By driving more organic traffic and leads, SEO can contribute to a brand's revenue growth and bottom line.

Support other aspects of your digital marketing strategy

SEO can support other aspects of your digital marketing strategy, and vice versa. SEO can support social media, paid advertising, email marketing, influencer marketing, content marketing, and more.

While SEO is just one single digital marketing tactic in the grand scheme of things, it’s still so important to include it in your overall digital marketing strategy.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn greater and more relevant traffic through search engines. On-page refers to optimizing both the content of a page and the HTML source code of that page. Effective on-page SEO helps users quickly find answers to their questions. The ultimate goal of on-page SEO is to make it as easy as possible for search engines and users to understand what a web page is about, identify if that page is relevant to a search query, and find that page useful and worthy of ranking high on the SERP. Some key elements of on-page SEO include creating high-quality, relevant, linkable content, effective use of keywords, optimizing title tags, URLs, meta descriptions, image alt text, and more.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to optimization techniques that are done outside of your own website. The goal of off-page SEO is to get both search engines and searchers to view your website as a trustworthy source, by boosting its authority and credibility. This can be done by other reputable places on the Internet, like pages, sites, and people. This can look like link building, social media marketing, guest blogging, influencer marketing, and other promotional activities in order to help improve your website's ranking on search engines. But, building backlinks is at the heart of off-page SEO, as search engines use backlinks as an indication of the linked content’s quality. A website that has many high-quality backlinks will typically rank higher than other websites with fewer, and less valuable backlinks. When actively building links, it’s important to avoid black hat activities, and rather focus on more organic link building.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website’s technical aspects to improve that website’s visibility and ranking on the SERPs. Improving technical aspects can help search engine spiders crawl your website more effectively, and improve the usability of your site. It’s great having well-thought-out and useful content, but if a search engine can’t crawl your website, it’s likely that very few people will actually see it. A technically optimized website is fast, easily crawlable for search engines, has limited duplicate content, a wide variety of links, is secure (for example, HTTPS is implemented), utilizes robots.txt, has structured data, and more. Having an XML sitemap is a plus, and can greatly improve the way search engine spiders crawl and find content on your website. Check out the free Technical SEO Site Audit Checklist to quickly check your own website’s technical SEO performance.

Local SEO

Local SEO is the practice of optimizing a business's web presence online, to improve its visibility in local organic search results Any business that has a physical location or serves in a particular geographic area can benefit from local SEO. Search engines rely on a number of signals when ranking local businesses, such as website optimization, local content, social profile pages, links, citations, local business listings, and managed reviews. Having a Google Business Profile presence is also critical if you’re serious about optimizing for local search. When done right, local SEO allows users to find information about your business quickly and easily, so it’s a benefit for both parties. It's clear that local SEO should not be ignored!

Keyword Research

Keyword research is a crucial element of any successful SEO strategy. It involves identifying and analyzing the search terms that people use on search engines to find information related to your business or industry. By conducting thorough keyword research, you can uncover valuable insights into your target audience's search behavior, allowing you to optimize your website's content to align with their needs and search intent. This process helps in driving more organic traffic to your site and improving your visibility on search engine results pages.

Content Optimization

Content optimization, also known as on-page SEO, focuses on enhancing the quality and relevance of your website's content to improve its ranking on search engines. This involves strategically using relevant keywords, optimizing title tags and meta descriptions, and ensuring that your content is engaging and informative. By delivering high-quality, valuable content that meets the needs of your target audience, you can increase your website's visibility, attract more visitors, and enhance user experience.

Link Building

Link building is an essential off-page SEO technique that aims to increase the number of high-quality inbound links to your website. These backlinks serve as endorsements from other reputable sites, boosting your website's authority and credibility in the eyes of search engines. Effective link-building strategies include guest blogging, influencer collaboration, and creating compelling content that naturally attracts links. By focusing on acquiring quality backlinks, you can improve your website's search engine rankings and drive more organic traffic.

Keep learning

• What Is SEO?
• The Beginner's Guide to SEO
• The SEO Keyword Research Master Guide
• How to Create an SEO Strategy
• On-Page Ranking Factors
• The One-Hour Guide to Technical SEO
• Local Search Marketing

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