SEO or Search Engine Optimisation in digital marketing is the optimisation of online content to get free traffic for your website. Search engines crawl websites and score them according to their content, backlinks, domain authority and a number of other criteria.
To optimise your website for certain keywords, there’s a few things you can do. Make sure you have content targeting those specific keywords you want to rank for on Google. Certain keywords are more competitive than others, so it’s not possible to rank for every one of your chosen keywords. This is why many bloggers will find low competition long tail keywords for their content marketing strategy.
In a particularly competitive topic, there’s going to be more websites competing for certain keywords. Since not everyone of them can rank (at the top of Google) for the same keyword, it’s a good idea to look at keywords which offer less competition so you have a greater chance of ranking your content.
Search Engine Optimisation In Digital Marketing – Things To Optimise
There’s a few simple things anyone can do to their website which will help in optimising. For search engines, some key content elements to optimise for are:
- Title tags
- Meta description
- Header tags
- Image alt text
Your off-site SEO too has a huge factor in your domain authority with Google (and other search engines). Long standing websites often have tens or even hundreds of thousands of backlinks, from other websites within their niche. These are one of the most important ranking factor which Google bases your SEO on. Other off-site (or “off page” SEO) factors are things such as social media presence, ratings and reviews, podcasts and off-site content marketing.
A useful plugin to help you crease SEO friendly content on your website is Yoast SEO. It’s a free plugin for WordPress users.
Search Engine Optimisation In Digital Marketing: SEO Vs. PPC
The two main ways of getting traffic to a website are through either organic marketing (SEO) and paid marketing. With organic marketing you create and optimise content on a website.
With PPC you run paid advertising sending visitors directly to your website, paying for each click on an advert you create. PPC (paid marketing) is relatively instantaneous. You can set up an run an advert in the same day, bringing in traffic to your website almost instantly. But with SEO, it takes much longer. With SEO you create and optimise quality content on your website in order to attract the attention of the search engines for your chosen keywords.
If successful, your website can appear on Google for your chosen keywords. How successful you are will depend on a few factors including the relative competitiveness of your topic and keywords, your domain age and the number of backlinks you have from other websites in your niche.
A good content marketing campaign will usually require the building of high quality content which attracts your target market persona in your particular field. A PPC campaign can easily be turned on and scaled up. You can see almost immediately whether a campaign is bringing in paying customers. An organic approach is much slower, and results will vary from one topic or niche to another.
Keyword Research
To find keywords within your niche which are relevant for your potential customers, you can use Google’s keyword planner tool. This tool will give you ideas for content within your particular topic or area of expertise. Start by typing in your main “seed” keyword into the planner. This is the main keyword which best describes your business, or the services you offer. So for example, I might use the keywords “digital marketing” for my “seed” keyword.
Once you type this into the planner, you’ll see a number of other keywords which relate to your seed keyword. The longer tail keywords which come up are typically the ones which have the least competition on Google. A strategy used by many bloggers is to target long tail keywords which have lower competition than the rest. When you do this for your content strategy, some of the content you create will rank on Google, (depending on how competitive your keyword terms are).
Building Backlinks
One of the main ranking factors use by Google is your backlinks. Backlinks are links from other websites outside your own. If you build high quality content as part of your content marketing strategy, over time people should naturally link to your content.
A natural link profile tells Google that your content is of high quality, and therefore your domain authority will rise. Poor content will be linked to less. People will click away from your blogs and Google sees this! So write high quality content for your visitors, not just for the Google bots which crawl your site.
You can also build your own backlinks to help with your link profile. To do this, you can reach out to other website owners in your niche and ask to offer guest posts. A guest post gives you the means to exchange a quality piece of content for a backlink. You can also leave blog comments and even create content outside your own blog on blogger websites such as Hubpages.com.
