The Bare Bones of SEO

Digital marketing has taken the business world by storm. Even small local businesses can benefit from making sure they have a presence in the digital world. There are many aspects to a complete digital marketing plan including building a website, utilizing email and developing a social media presence. The best marketing plan will address all of these aspects, but no digital marketing plan is complete without the inclusion of well-crafted search engine optimization (SEO).

Search engine optimization is a simple concept that requires some complex knowledge to perfect. At its core, SEO is a way to ensure that your website ranks high with search engines such as Google. That means that when potential customers go online to search for solutions to their shopping needs, your website will be one of the first few suggestions that they are given. The details of how to make that happen are a bit more complicated.

In-depth SEO is best done by professionals, but if you are interested in using this essential strategy you should understand the basics. There are a few core components of SEO that are essential to any marketing plan.

Create Quality Content

Google analyzes websites for the quality of the information they offer to users. Content is one of the keystones of a great user experience, and search engines use complex algorithms to determine what kind of experience you offer.

A car dealership seeking to improve their search engine ranking will offer automotive SEO that gives quality information to their customers pertaining to a wide range of topics. Certainly, they will offer articles and blogs that give insight into automotive topics, but if their customer base is primarily adults with families, they might offer information on traveling with children or fostering independence in teens. Google’s algorithms give a great amount of credence to reliable, fact-based information.

Finally, it is essential to keep the content on your website current. Google analytics can detect whether a website is being updated regularly and is offering up-to-date information and will boost or downrank it accordingly. Regardless of your business or the focus of your website, your rankings can be positively affected by including timely content about current events in the social realm or in world events on a regular basis.

Do Your Research

Content on your website should be comprehensive and based on facts, but you also need to do your research when it comes to how your potential customers are searching for you. Again, this topic can get very complex, but put simply, what words are your customers using when they are looking for solutions that are similar to what your business offers? Identifying these keywords is a crucial step in advancing your SEO efforts.

Use Keywords Organically

Once you have identified the most important keywords, you now need to imbed these keywords into the content on your website. When SEO was new, this concept often led to nonsensical content that existed only as a vehicle for the repetition of a particular keyword. As Google’s algorithms have grown more complex, it has gained the ability to identify this kind of useless content and will actually downrank a site if it finds the site is using this dishonest practice.

You need content that integrates these important keywords in an organic way as part of an information-rich article, blogpost or questionnaire. Google is becoming much more intuitive with its technology and will even recognize natural language that is similar to keywords, so the old strategy of keyword density has become obsolete.

Digital marketing is driving a huge sector of the business world and is no longer optional for companies that want to stay on top of their industry. Large corporations dedicate entire departments to these practices and hire multiple professionals to stay on the cutting edge. Small businesses that do not have the marketing budget for such an approach can still benefit by including the bare basics of SEO-rich digital marketing in their plans.