Why SEO Is an Ongoing Marketing Strategy

This blog post will explore the reasons why SEO Is an Ongoing Marketing Strategy for any business.  Almost every single business owner, entrepreneur and blogger that I speak to all share with me that one of their number one goals is to have their website appear at the top of Page one on Google search results.  If this is one of your goals...read on!

First of all, before you can rank on page one of Google - it is really important that you understand how truly complicated this is.  Did you know that there are over 200 known factors that Google uses to rank websites on their search engines?  Check out this article from Backlinko.com that goes into these factors in depth.

Second, understanding what SEO is, and how it affects your business is also really important.  The reason you want your business to rank on Google is because the website traffic that Google sends to your website is proven to be higher quality than any other source because the person that comes from Google is literally searching for the exact product or service that you offer.  This means that they are already prequalified to purchase from you.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  It is the ongoing task of making sure your website and website pages are optimized in a way that will allow search engines to find them and rank them on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).  Search engine optimization is NEVER DONE.  This is a critical factor you must understand.  SEO tasks include but are not limited to: 

• onsite technical optimization
• keyword research
• competition analysis
• content creation
• backlink building

Search Engine Optimization SEO is NEVER DONE

If you take a look at the list above as a short list of some of the tasks that contribute to your business gaining those valuable clicks from Google, lets explore each one and why there is no such thing as "my SEO was done by the person that created my website". I can guarantee you this will be false because SEO is never DONE.

Onsite Technical Optimization

Probably the number one most important task of SEO, making sure all of your pages and posts are optimized from a technical perspective is an ongoing task as you continue to add content to your site it will need to be checked.  Technical examples for SEO include:

• Heading Tags
• Meta Tags
• Alt Tags
• Mobile optimization / responsiveness
• Site speed, page load speed
• Word count, quality of content

If your website has never had this optimization done, then this is where an SEO expert will start, (after doing keyword research of course).  Making sure the structural foundations of your website are optimized for Google will be an important place to start.  

Then as you add new content, you will also need to make sure that these pieces are done on each new blog post, event page, image, video, or static page.  One program I love to use for this is YOAST, which is a popular SEO plugin for WordPress.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the SEO function to compile a list of search terms that relate to your business, your website, and your customers.  It's important not just to identify what keywords are relevant to your business, but what the search volumes are of keywords.  For example if you believe your website should be ranking on page one of search results for "Real Estate Agent My Town", but in reality the majority of searches in terms of quantity are actually "Affordable Homes for Sale in My Town" then you will be much better to work on the second keyword set to get higher volumes.

I suggest most websites start this process with 10-20 keywords they believe they want to rank for on Google.  Then expand this research by using tools that show you what actual search results are for those keywords.  I use Google Keyword Planner, but there are others.

Keyword research must be done on an ongoing basis because over time you will want to build more keywords for your website to be found for, and also keyword popularity changes over time.  What might be getting 100,000 searches this month might drop to 10,000 next month.  And don't forget as trends change so will keywords.  Not to mention there are always new words popping up every year.  3 years ago the keyword COVID did not even exist.  

Competition Analysis

Where do websites go to die?  Page 2 of Google!

This is funny, but true.  Statistically only 25% of users will click on page 2 of Google to see the search results.  This means that if you page is not on page 1 you are missing out on 75% of the searches or more.

The trick in SEO is not necessarily to be #1 (well that is actually ideal), but always to be at least one ranking spot ahead of your competition!  

Thus comes in the important SEO task of monitoring your competition, and how they are ranking, so that you can take action if they are outranking you.  Most SEO software have a section that will do this automatically based on keyword and geographic region searches.  Watching your competition and tracking their search engine results is one of the most frustrating and fast moving parts of successful SEO strategy.  It can mean the gain (or loss) of thousands of clicks from search engines each month.

Content Creation

A solid and continual content creation strategy is critical to your SEO success.  Related Blog Post:

The easiest and most popular way to work on content for SEO purposes is to create blog posts or articles and add them to your website on a regular basis.  Your quick wins will come from combining keyword research and opportunities to the articles you create and publish.  At Dufferin Media our SEO consultant provides us with a constant idea stream of topics & titles for Blogs that align with our SEO Strategy.

I also love content marketing using blogs, because it creates great content for social media and email marketing too!

Backlink Building

Backlinks are links from other websites that link back to your website.  Google analyzes these backlinks as part of their ranking algorithms to gauge how valuable the content is on your website.  The more quality backlinks you have, surely your website content must be trustworthy and valuable to users right?  When exploring your backlink building strategy it is good to keep in mind the following:

• Older domains may be more valuable to backlink from
• The higher the Domain Authority (DA) score the better
• Use keywords in the backlink anchor text
• Be careful of BAD backlinks that might actually damage your rankings
• Quality over quantity when backlink building

RELATED ARTICLE ON HOW TO BUILD QUALITY BACKLINKS

INVEST IN SEO AND IT WILL BE WORTH IT!

SEO is an ongoing marketing task that needs to be revisited on a regular basis. By doing a periodic audit of your website and making the necessary changes, you can ensure that your site is always performing at its best. At Dufferin Media, we offer free SEO audits to help businesses identify any areas they may need to improve. If you are interested in a FREE Audit please contact me I'd be happy to do this for you. Thanks for reading!