Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of taking steps to help a website or content rank higher on Google. It involves things like keyword research, content creation, link building, and technical audits. SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing because people perform trillions of searches every year, often with the commercial intention of finding information about products and services. Search is often the main source of digital traffic for brands and complements other marketing channels. Higher visibility and ranking higher in search results than competitors can have a major impact on your bottom line.
An SEO marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan to attract more visitors to your website through search engines. Successful SEO includes on-page strategies, which use intent-based keywords; and off-page strategies, which get inbound links from other websites. To successfully build a digital marketing strategy, you have to master the search engines.
If you're just getting started with SEO, here are 10 essential tips to help you get started. We'll talk about creating a good website structure, using intent-based keywords, getting inbound links from other websites, mastering technical SEO, creating good content, leveraging paid advertising, learning SEO jargon, hiring an SEO professional, reposting content correctly, and understanding white hat SEO.
Creating a good website structure is an important part of technical SEO. You can start to learn about your overall SEO progress by looking at traffic at the page level (outside your site's homepage). Content is key when it comes to SEO - if your content isn't good, it doesn't matter because people won't be interested in you.
Paid advertising helps to show your content to the right audience and increase traffic to your website faster, which benefits your SEO performance. In addition to that, you might want to consider hiring an SEO professional who can help you audit your pages. Reposting your content on other websites or reposting your guest posts on your own site doesn't hurt your SEO unless you do it incorrectly (spam).
White hat SEO refers to all the usual SEO techniques that adhere to guidelines and rules. What's likely to interest you as a business owner or employee is how you can leverage SEO to help drive traffic, leads, sales, and ultimately more relevant revenue and profits for your business. These factors automatically affect how someone responds to your content, but your SEO efforts also behave differently from one area of the world to another.
