Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the fastest growing marketing industries in the world. It is estimated to be a well over $80 billion industry that’s growing faster than ever. Being new to the SEO industry and having no knowledge of what is SEO in digital marketing isn’t bad. However, not using SEO to reach your target audience and to generate traffic is no less than a marketing sin.
Why?
Because a whopping 93% of online experience starts with a search engine. Imagine your website not showing in the search engines to your ideal customers.
You’ll lose not just visitors but potential customers.
It makes SEO a must-have in today’s world that’s powered by the internet and search engines.
What is SEO in Digital Marketing?
SEO in digital marketing is defined as the practice of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic that you receive from search engines (known as organic traffic). You optimize your website for search engines so that it ranks high for your target keywords in search engines.
Here is an example of what SEO can do with your website’s organic traffic:
This website went from 0 to 197,514 monthly visitors in just two years with the help of SEO.
The process might be time-consuming but it pays off big time. SEO won’t disappoint you when done right.
Types of SEO
Search engine optimization has two main types:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
1. On-Page SEO
It is also known as on-site SEO that refers to optimizing your website and its content for search engines and people. It involves practices that you take on your website to improve search engine ranking such as improving website load time, optimizing content, title tag optimization, etc.
Here is an on-page SEO checklist that includes the most important factors:
It also includes technical SEO that is a subtype of on-page SEO. Technical SEO covers all the technical aspects of your website that make it compliant with search engine requirements. This often includes fixing broken links, identifying and fixing crawl errors, improving website navigation, etc.
Since technical SEO factors are related to your website, therefore, it isn’t considered a separate SEO division. It is merged with on-page SEO.
2. Off-Page SEO
It includes all such SEO practices that you take outside your website. There are several off-page SEO factors that influence your website’s ranking such as backlinks, linking domains, social signals, etc.
Here are the most important off-page SEO factors:
The impact of off-page SEO on search engine ranking is higher than on-page SEO. This is a reason why most marketers prefer investing in off-page SEO especially backlink acquisition as it is the most important SEO factor.
A study by Ahrefs found that there is a strong correlation between referring domains (backlinks) and search traffic:
However, both on-page and off-page SEO are equally important.
How SEO Works
No matter what marketers perceive and do, there are more than 200 Google ranking factors that you need to focus on to improve ranking. And focusing on merely off-site SEO won’t help much if your website isn’t optimized properly (on-page SEO).
Both on-site and off-site SEO work together.
But how does SEO work?
How Search Engines Work
In order to understand how SEO works, you first need to see how search engines work.
Here is how search engines work:
Search engines use crawlers (also known as web crawlers) that scan the internet and find content. These crawlers visit websites to find new content and content changes. This crawling activity is known as crawl. The data from all over the internet is stored and indexed where content is categorized. Then the search engine’s algorithm scans the index and matches the search query with the relevant categories and content in the index.
The algorithm also ranks content based on ranking factors that are defined by the search engines.
This is how search engines work.
How Optimization Works
Search engine optimization involves techniques to ensure your content is crawlable, understandable, and indexable. When you write and publish content, you target certain keywords so that it ranks for those keywords.
These keywords help the search engine index to categorize and show your content for relevant terms. Similarly, it involves all the efforts to improve ranking on the search engine results page so that your content ranks high in results.
The factors that search engines use to rank search results are unknown. Marketers can only guess based on data that what factors have the most influence on search engine rankings.
Here is a list of Google’s ranking factors that you need to focus on to improve the search engine ranking of your website.
When your website is optimized, it is highly likely to rank higher on the search results page. Search engine users are more likely to click results towards the top of the first page as compared to results towards the end of the first page. Move to the second page, and you won’t get any organic traffic at all.
The first position on Google receives 28.5% of traffic, the second position receives 15.7%, and the last result on the first page merely receives 2.5% of traffic:
This clearly shows the importance of SEO and why you should get serious about search engine optimization. If you can’t make it to the first page, you don’t exist.
As much as 90.63% of content gets no traffic from Google:
Make sure your web pages and content don’t fall into this category. And this is only possible when your content is optimized for search engines.
SEO is a Must
Search engine optimization is the future. It plays a significant role in your business success. The traffic you receive from search engines is most likely to convert.
Because these are the users who are actively searching for a solution to their problems. Your target audience finds you and connects with you. This is the beauty of inbound marketing and SEO.
Simply knowing what is SEO in digital marketing and what role it plays in inbound marketing is the basics. It is time to invest your time and marketing budget in SEO.
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