Marketing: What is SEO? A quick guide for beginners
- May 12, 2021
The key to web positioning
When you have a question, about any random topic, you go to Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other search engine, right? Nowadays there is no point in wasting time asking a friend what is the nearest store to buy sunglasses. And among the hundreds of suggestions that appear, your finger always taps on the first results presented. Second page? Third page? What is that? What you are looking for must be somewhere on the first result page!
So, before stepping into boring specific terminology, we want to tell you that this is what SEO is all about. That is, who appears high in Google search results, is doing good SEO implementation.
So, what is SEO and why do I need it?
SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, is a discipline within Digital Marketing that helps users find what they are looking for. On the other side, we can say that SEO helps anyone who has a website, an online store, or a blog, to appear on the first search results page. Basically and in other words, SEO helps search engines better understand the content that is being published and classify it so that they can then present it to users in the most accurate way possible.
How to develop a good marketing strategy?
Within the world of Digital Marketing, there are several ways or choices to carry out a successful strategy. Thus, you will have a short but paid path, and another longer but free path.
Let us think of a practical example. You have a cell phone cover design company, and every time a user searches “custom cell phone covers” you want your company to appear right at the top of the results. Within marketing strategies, you will have the option of simply paying for digital campaigns (to learn more about the importance of SEM to increase your conversion rate, read this quick guide on Google ADS) or do a little more complex but free work to gain organic results. And this is where we can say that SEO turns out to be the king of Digital Marketing because its implementations are free and the results are of quality and long-lasting.
Seen this way, although the results take a few weeks or even months, a good SEO implementation will result in leads or sales opportunities of better quality and with a better conversion rate.
What is the purpose of SEO in a marketing strategy?
The goal of SEO is to attract high-quality traffic from search engines to your website, organically. And now, I know what you’re thinking “but my goal is to increase sales!” Well, you must know that today Google is the perfect tool to sell, so more visibility attracts more visitors. And more visits will generate an increase in sales.
How does SEO work to attract more visitors?
SEO requires a lot of research in order to appear first in the search results. Redundant? It might be. It is necessary to do great research of keywords first.
What is a keyword?
It is the term that is searched by the user and with which you want to appear on the first page of Google. If we go back to that example above, the phrase used “personalized phone cases” is a keyword. Therefore, you need to first understand which keywords would be best for your company’s niche. One technique that does not fail is to think about how users search for your product? “Cheap personalized covers”, “personalized covers with photos”, “covers for Samsung” may be just some of the possibilities.
And in order to come up with those words, we must do some SEO optimizations. To understand how it works, let’s divide these optimizations into two: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
SEO On Page
SEO on-page involves those optimizations that we can do internally to improve our website. Ask yourself: how relevant is your website in relation to the keywords you want to position? Here is where you are going to make it clear what your company is: covers cell phones maker or t-shirts seller, or whatever.
For SEO on Page sake, we will pay special attention to the following elements:
- Hierarchy of titles and subtitles (Heading tags: H1, H2, H3, etc.)
- Descriptions (both of our website and of our products/services)
- Images / Videos
- Content (is it relevant? Does the user find what he is looking for when he searches for your keyword?)
- Internal interlinking (all pages of our site must have an incoming link, at least)
Through these optimizations, we are improving our entire internal structure to help search engines understand who we are, what we do, what we sell, etc.
SEO Off Page
If in SEO On Page we deal with the optimizations that we can make within our website, in contrast, through SEO Off Page, we will make all possible improvements outside of our website. For that, we need the help of other sites that give faith to what we do or sell. In this way, we increase our authority.
How come? Imagine that a well-known mobile phone repair shop and even a technology blogger who has thousands of readers both liked the designs and the quality of your covers and make a recommendation on their own website by adding a link that goes directly to your company’s website. In this way, we are indicating to Google that our products are recommended by relevant sites, or by “someone” who knows about mobile phones. We’re giving Google one more reason to be the first to appear in search results.
In SEO, this is called “Link Building” or “Backlinks” and, unlike optimizations made on-page, it doesn’t depend on us very much, since it is another entity that likes our work and gives some reference or mention. Once again, we highlight the importance of on-page SEO and the quality of our content (you can learn about the Content Marketing practices in this article) since it is the optimizations that depend on us.
In conclusion, the SEO strategy that works best is one that attracts an audience that is of interest to us. If you’re not doing it, Logrise can help you. Ask for a free quote.
SEO Dictionary
If you still have doubts, we leave a mini dictionary of the main terms we used in this article:
Authority (DA or Domain Authority): it is a metric that indicates how relevant your site is to Google’s eyes. The values of this metric have 1 as a minimum and 100 as a maximum. The higher that number, the better your authority. A new site has a DA 1. A site like Wikipedia, has 96. The Domain Authority is transmitted from one site to another, via the incoming links (see “Backlinks”).
Backlinks: are links from other sites that point to yours. The more relevant these other pages are, the more authority you can gain in the eyes of Google. The quality of the links is always more important than the quantity.
Domain Authority: See Authority
Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3): are HTML attributes that help to differentiate titles (H1) from subtitles (H2, H3, H4, etc.) and their hierarchy (obviously, a title is more important than a subtitle. An H3 is more important than an H4 ). In this way, we make the text simpler and more organized to read and tell users and search engines what are the most important parts of an article.
Keyword: are the search words or terms. In other words, it is the way in which users write when it comes to searching. The choice of one or the other keyword in the titles and content of a page, will determine the strategy along with the other factors of SEO positioning. Nowadays, many of the SEO tools focus on searching and optimizing keywords as much as possible to help with positioning.
Leads: it is a very broad term, but we can reduce it to users who have shown an interest in our product or service. We can say that they are our “potential customers”, since they filled out some form of subscription, registration, contact or downloaded some content that they liked, etc. In this way, these contacts are in our database and we can interact with them to carry out any type of strategy in order to complete the sale or the final action that we expected.
Organic results: these are those “natural” visits that arrive at our website without having paid for any type of digital campaign. When we talk about organic results we mean both search engines and social networks
SEM (Search Engine Marketing): it is the set of strategies that help to increase the visibility of our website through paid campaigns. Many marketers use this term only to refer to paid advertising or results, but the truth is that it is necessary to have a good understanding of the use of keywords – among other factors – for a campaign to be successful.
