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What is the meaning of SEO in marketing ?
The meaning of SEO in marketing is “Search Engine Optimization” which is the process of improving your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPS). And when we refer to search engines, we’re talking about Google, Yahoo, Bing, and the likes. Although Google is by far the most popular search engine today, and therefore the most important.
To improve your website so that it ranks in the top search results, you need to put in place good optimisation practices. These optimisations can be carried out by yourself or by SEO consultants specialising in natural referencing.
As you can see, SEO is crucial for any brand or service provider with a website. So what is the meaning of SEO in marketing? How does SEO work ? What are the different types of SEO ?
If you’re a company looking to improve the visibility of your website or a marketer interested in SEO, read this article carefully, where we’ll explain what SEO is.
What are the goals of SEO ?
SEO (also known as natural referencing) is a branch of digital marketing. SEO focuses on attracting leads to a website. SEO (also known as natural search engine optimisation) is a branch of digital marketing and is therefore positioned at the top of the marketing funnel. Here are the main goals of SEO:
- Optimise a website through differents seo strategies
- Maximise website visibility
- Rank website higher on search results
- Increase website’s organic traffic
- Attract qualified leads
How does SEO work ?
For a site to rank well on search engines, it is vital to understand how their algorithms work. We’re going to focus on Google because it’s the most popular search engine. Firstly it’s important to understand exactly how Google ranks websites…
When a user inputs their search terms, known as ‘keywords’, into the Google search box, Google then uses over 200+ ranking criteria to determine which websites to display to give the searcher the most relevant information related to their search.
The important thing to take away from this is that Google wants to show its users/searchers the most relevant results related to the searches made, this keeps their users coming back time and time again. So your website pages must be relevant to the keywords you want them to rank for.
In addition to the relevance of keywords, there are other important criteria that Google will look at when indexing and positioning your website in its results page:
- Content quality: Google will look at the quality of the content on your website:
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- Does it meet search intent?
- Does it add value?
- Is it properly written?
- Is it original (not plagiarised)?
- Website’s speed: The speed of your website is an important criteria to take into account. A slow website will put off your visitors, which will increase the bounce rate… And that’s something Google will notice and penalise you for. Make sure you optimise the speed of your site to avoid this.
- User Experience(UX): Just as a slow site increases the bounce rate, a poor user experience on your website is likely to penalise you heavily. Think about creating an ideal user path and a pleasant design for your website.
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- Mobile-Friendly: Mobile internet has become the norm in recent years. According to this study, 62.5% of users use a mobile phone. So it’s important to ensure that your website is optimised for use on a mobile device.
All these optimisations that enable a website to be correctly positioned on Google are carried out through SEO. It is the SEO experts who will ensure that your website meets Google’s referencing criteria and who will put in place strategies to position a website well on Google.
What are the key components of SEO ?
SEO has 3 pillars that need to be taken into account when optimising a website for search engines. Let’s see what they are:
- On-Page SEO: On-page SEO involves all the improvements made to the pages of a website. These improvements include:
- Keyword research: This involves searching for and identifying keywords related to your niche.
- Content Optimization: This involves optimising the content of the website for users and search engines by:
- Including keywords
- Having an organised title structure
- Optimising meta datas for each page
- Off-Page SEO: Off-page seo refers to all the optimisation actions carried out outside the website. There are two of these:
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- Link Building: Link building, also known as netlinking, is an optimisation technique aimed at obtaining external links pointing to your website from websites with a high reputation (high authority).
- Social Signals: Although social networks are not a direct positioning factor, they do contribute by generating traffic to the website.
- Technical SEO: This consists of technical improvements to the website such as:
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- Making sure your website is crawlable and indexable.
- Structuring your website for user experience and easy navigation.
- Get good results on Google’s vital web core, which measures website performance and speed.
What are the types of SEO ?
There are 5 types of SEO:
- White hat SEO: These are all techniques that are ethical and approved by search engines to help you rank well in the search results.
- Black hat SEO: Unlike white hat seo, black hat seo is a set of unethical techniques prohibited by search engines to achieve a good position in the search results. This includes keyword spamming, cloaking and Blog Comment Spam.
- Local SEO: Optimising your website to be found locally(city or state)
- International SEO: Optimising your website so that it can be found in different countries
- Ecommerce SEO: SEO for e-commerce sites
How to learn SEO ?
If you want to specialise in SEO or apply it yourself to your website, there are a two ways to learn natural referencing:
- Free online seo course: Perfect to learn seo basics for beginners
- online search engine optimization course: a paid course that will teach you in detail how to master SEO
Conclusion
SEO (search engine optimisation) is a digital marketing speciality. Its aims are to attract qualified target customers, increase the traffic and visibility of a website and ensure long-term organic traffic. To achieve these objectives, SEO strategies need to be established in line with search engine recommendations. If properly applied, SEO will increase conversions on a website. We hope this article on the meaning of seo in marketing has enlightened you a little. Don’t hesitate to read our other blog posts to find out more on the subject!
2 Responses
I like the simple way you explained this, thanks.
Most welcome Sherrie