What is SEO?

Should Your Company Invest in Search Engine Optimization?

Are you looking for the next best marketing strategy to bring in more traffic for your business? Have you put much stock in digital marketing tactics? Do your competitors have active marketing campaigns of their own? It’s time to invest in long-term digital marketing! The right online advertising and marketing tactics can promote growth and exposure for your business. Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is one option business owners are considering. But what is SEO, and how can it help your business? Allow WebDesign309 to explain!

Understanding SEO

Search Engine Optimization, commonly called SEO, aims to increase a website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) without needing paid advertising. At its core, SEO involves optimizing specific elements of your website, including a webpage’s content, structure, and technical aspects. The idea is to make your website more attractive to search engines like Google and Bing.

Because search engines aim to provide users with the most relevant and helpful results based on their queries, tailoring SEO content to your target audience is essential. Ensuring your website achieves high-quality content, user-friendly design, and proper keyword usage gives it a better chance of ranking higher in SERPs. This increased visibility can lead to more traffic, which, in turn, offers additional opportunities to generate leads, conversions, and revenue for your business.

How Important is Being at the Top of SERPs?

It’s incredibly important! Think back on your own search habits: How often are you scrolling to the third, fourth, or fifth page of results to find the answer to your inquiry? Maybe if you are researching a subject or topic, you go further into your results; however, most search engine users find what they need on the first or second pages. If your website lands on the third page or higher, you will likely not be found!

Google has made some changes in recent years to how their SERPs function. Rather than being separated into individual pages, Google has begun implementing an infinite scroll on some SERPs, so there is no second page. However, even with the elimination of pages, the top three results still get the most clicks. Through SEO tactics targeting the keywords and questions users are most likely to type into Google, you can rank your website in those top spots.

The Benefits of SEO

The biggest draw to Search Engine Optimization is having your website rank highly in popular search engines. As such, there are advantages to implementing a successful SEO strategy that extends well beyond how your website shows up in a Google search. Examples of those advantages include:

• Increased Visibility – As you might expect, the higher you’re ranking in SERPs, the more visible your website becomes to potential customers.
• Enhanced User Experience – Much of SEO involves optimizing the structure and layout of your website. Creating a more navigable, user-friendly experience benefits you and your site visitors.
• Greater Credibility – If your website continually appears in results related to your products or services, users will perceive it as more trustworthy and credible.
• Competitive Advantage – By employing effective SEO strategies, you can outrank your competitors in search engine results, gaining a competitive edge in your industry.
• Long-Term Results – While SEO takes time to take effect, its benefits are long-lasting. As long as you maintain and update optimized pages, you’ll continue to rank highly long after implementing your SEO strategies.
• Better Understanding of Customer Behavior – SEO tools and analytics provide valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and search patterns, allowing for more targeted and effective marketing strategies.

What Are Some Common Aspects of SEO?

SEO isn’t a “one strategy fits all” type of service! There are many unique SEO aspects that contribute to your website’s quality and ranking potential overall. At WebDesign309, some of what you can expect from our SEO capabilities include:

• Local SEO – Creating website pages focused on keywords relevant to your products or services, targeting geographic areas close to your business.
• Keyword Planning – Our team researches the best short and long-tail keyword phrases related to your business/industry that are likely to bring the most views and clicks to your website.
• Blog Posts – We write blog articles that address your audience’s most pressing questions, explain aspects of your business, or relay important news while targeting relevant keywords.
• On-Page Optimization – The technical side of SEO: We write meta titles and descriptions, add alt descriptions to images, create a web of links between content pages, organize your website’s UI, etc.
• Backlinking – We reach out to other websites related to your industry, those with average to high domain authority, and request posting content and links that lead back to your website.
• Press Releases – For important news and events involving your business, we help create press releases to post on news sites across the web.
• Listing Management – We help place a short description of your business and essential contact info on listing sites likely to give your business the most exposure.
• Review Management – Our team offers review management services to help improve your website’s authority and search ranking by building a strong review profile.

Include SEO in Your Broader Marketing Strategy

As effective as an SEO campaign can be for your business, it’s only one side of the “digital marketing” coin. Not to mention, there are other marketing strategies, online and offline, that can help build your brand, improve your authority/visibility, and ultimately increase traffic and lead generation. By incorporating SEO alongside paid digital advertising (SEM), social media promotion, website design, and more, you can create a comprehensive marketing strategy that is sure to produce results.

To get started on your marketing strategy or learn more about SEO services, reach out to the experts at WebDesign309 today! We provide our clients with exceptional web design and digital marketing local competitors can’t match! You can contact us by calling 309-213-9398 or filling out our online form.