Since the world has become a global village, we see that everything is now just one tap away from our access. We are exposed to a vast amount of information since the resurgence of the internet, and we also see that many businesses have shifted their modes to an online model from traditional ones. With this, we see that our search engines have now become popular markets where businesses register themselves, create their websites, and sell their products and services.
To succeed in the market, businesses engage in digital marketing activities to promote their services and strive to be the first website a potential customer visits, rather than a competitor’s. There are two common digital marketing practices commonly done by businesses to promote their products and services. The first one is promotion through paid ads, which is also known as PPC (pay-per-click), and the second one is known as SEO (search engine optimization).
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Search engine optimization is a process of improving the ranking or visibility of a website on search engines through organic (unpaid) means. In SEO, businesses make their website more relevant and accessible to their audience so that they can build authority for their website and drive quality traffic to their website, which could ultimately benefit their businesses in terms of maximizing their ROI.
SEO is one of the fastest-growing digital marketing tactics amongst businesses because it is free of cost, unlike paid marketing, where you need an allocated budget to promote your business.
Core focus areas of SEO
As explained, SEO deals with the visibility of a website, so an SEO expert deals with everything that can enhance the visibility and ranking of the website on SERP (search engine results page). While knowing about SEO, the first thing we need to know about it is that SEO is a long-term process; we cannot expect fruitful results overnight, unlike paid marketing, where you can see immediate growth. SEO, if it is long, also ensures that the traffic or the people coming to your website stay engaged with your business for a long time period, while in paid marketing, you can get immediate leads, but we are not sure about the time duration regarding their engagement with the business.
Here are some core areas on which we focus during the process of SEO, or here are some core types of SEO
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is the most basic core area of focus in the whole process; it deals with optimizing elements present within the website pages. Here are the following components that are targeted while doing on-page SEO
High-quality Content
Content is the backbone of SEO; without the content, any website is just a structured format by coding and a design made by effective UI and UX strategies. High-quality content drives natural traffic, builds trust for your business amongst the audience, drives natural backlinks, and signals E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trust) to search engines, i.e., Google.
HTML Tags
Optimized HTML tags (H1, H2, etc.) help search engines to understand, crawl, and efficiently index your website. They lead visitors to understand the content and result in higher rankings by increasing organic traffic. It improves CTR (click-through rate) and enhances user experience.
Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions
On-page SEO depends on optimized meta titles and descriptions since they serve as your webpage’s ad in search results, increase Click-Through Rates (CTR), attract users with relevant, keyword-rich snippets, enhance user experience (reducing bounce rates), indicate to search engines the quality of the content, and, finally, result in more organic traffic and brand recognition.
Alt Texts of Images
Alt texts are the descriptive explanations of the images used in the content. Good keyword-enriched alt text helps search engines to understand the image content for indexing, which increases the search traffic of the image and keywords relevant to the image naturally.
Internal Linking
Connecting one page of the website to another page by using hyperlinks is termed internal linking. It helps to improve site structure, which helps search engines to crawl faster and distribute link equity across the website, and makes less popular pages get more visibility.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO involves a set of activities performed outside the website to build authority, credibility, and relevance of your website for search engines. A good off-page SEO strategy involves high-quality backlinks, social media signals, and brand mentions.
Core focus areas in off-page SEO
- Link building: the process of getting other reputable websites with higher traffic to link to your website. High-quality backlinks can make crawlers and visitors discover your content, which builds credibility and authority for your website.
- Digital PR: It is the strategic use of online outreach in which content is marketed, and relationships are built to earn high-quality backlinks and brand mentions from authoritative websites, which will ultimately enhance the credibility of your own website
- Social Media Outreach: Social media has played a very important role in the promotion and success of many businesses. An effective portrayal ofthe content of your own business on social media platforms can make your business grow in an effective manner.
- Guest Post Outreach: it is a win-win tactic in which a business contacts a host website to exchange high-quality content, asa result of which it can receive high-quality backlinks, which will yield brilliant results.
Technical SEO
Optimizing website infrastructure (code, server, and structure) so that crawlers can easily index and rank the website is known as technical SEO. It is different from on-page SEO and off-page SEO because it deals with the things at the backend of the website, such as sitemaps, URL structure, and structured data.
Key areas focused on technical SEO
As discussed earlier, technical SEO deals with the things behind the scenes. Here are the points that are focused on in technical SEO
- Crawlability and Indexability: Optimized website infrastructure can help search engines get ranked quickly and easily by search engines.
- Site speed: Optimized site speed results in better user experience and keeps users engaged with your website. Slow loading speed can hurt the user experience, and there is a chance that the visitor bounces back.
- Mobile friendliness: a technical SEO expert ensures that the website is working well on mobile devices because most of the users are now engaging through their smartphones
- Site architecture: a logically organized website with clear URLs has better chances of getting ranked and indexed because it provides a clear understanding to the search engine crawler
- Duplicate content: elimination of identical and duplicate content can manage the website and make it more convenient for visitors to engage well
Local SEO
It is the most trending concept of SEO in modern days due to the resurgence of local businesses. Local SEO is all about optimizing the website in a way to attract local customers. In local SEO, we use keyword phrases including “near me” as well,l for example, “premium SEO services near me,” or we also specify an area in case we want to attract the customers of a specific area, such as “high-end plumbing services in California, USA.”
SEO Vs Paid Ads
As mentioned earlier, paid ads require an allocated budget so that we can draw better outcomes from them, while SEO is free of cost. The visitors we attract through paid marketing campaigns can come faster, but the point to ponder is that the visitors will not be sustainable; they will come visit your website and go.
While in the case of search engine optimization (SEO), it might be a lengthy process because in SEO, our ultimate focus as the website owner is to drive organic traffic towards our website without paying anything. In SEO, we are focused on building our brand trust through certain tactics so that we can increase our authority on search engines.
Why is SEO a long-term investment?
We can consider SEO as a long-term investment for our business because we aren’t paying anything upfront for it, but as we do it effectively, it will bring organic traffic. It will bring people who will visit your website again and again, and it will provide you with productive engagements that can maximize your ROI as well.
SEO will result in building the trust of your brand, and engaging content on it will inform people about the progress and innovation of your brand. Good technical and off-page strategies will build your brand on every platform, including SERP and social media platforms as well.
Conclusion
The overall crux of the debate is that in the field of digital marketing, both paid ads and SEO have their own importance in building businesses, but when we talk about sustainability and long-term growth, SEO is your go-to option to promote your businesses.
We at The Chimera Marketing are a team of highly expert professionals leveraging their expertise in the field of digital marketing and SEO. To promote your business on digital platforms, you can easily trust and gain maximum ROI for your business.
Frequently Asked Questions
Have Questions About Our Marketing Services? We Have Answers!
Why is SEO time-consuming to provide results as opposed to paid advertising?
SEO is not a fast process, as the search engines must crawl, index, and analyze the content of your site, the authority of your site, and the relevance of your site. As opposed to paid advertisement, SEO is based on trust, high content, and efficient site architecture that does not rise immediately but gradually.
What does SEO do to keep the traffic coming even after the campaigns are completed?
When a page is ranked, it can keep on receiving organic traffic without incurring constant advertisement expenses. Good quality content, good backlinks, and optimized pages will be left visible in the search results, and the presence of SEO will provide a steady flow of traffic even after the initial efforts.
Is paid marketing or SEO better for the long run?
YES, SEO is usually cost-effective in the long run, since it does not necessitate the payment of every click. Though it requires initial investment, the returns that will be achieved as time goes on are usually more than the costs, and this makes SEO a sustainable and scalable marketing strategy.
What does SEO do to create trust and credibility for a business online?
Organically ranked websites are also seen as more credible by users. SEO enhances the quality of the sites, relevance of the content, and user experience, which is beneficial in building greater credibility and sustainable brand power.
What would be the effect on the ranking of websites when there is no SEO?
When the SEO activities are halted altogether, the rankings will steadily decrease as the competitors will become better, and search algorithms will advance. Nevertheless, good SEO principles might be used to keep providing results over a certain period, and this is why regular optimization is critical in keeping visible.
