What Is SEO Marketing?

Search engines are undeniably some of the most useful tools of the modern-day, and tens of thousands of searches are conducted every second. In this digital age of business, having an online presence is essential, especially when you’re trying to build brand awareness and market yourself effectively. Thankfully, search engines can help your business thrive if you know how to use them to your advantage.

The content you post and your website will be endlessly overlooked unless you make an effort for it to be found—this is where SEO marketing comes in. Keep reading to learn more about what SEO is, why it matters, and how it can help you get more web traffic.

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The Importance of SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a tactic used to increase your online visibility and website traffic and expose more people to your business, your content, and your brand in general. 

There are ways to increase your web traffic with the help of paid ads—for example, if you search “how do I start a garden?”, the first several results are paid advertisements that the search engine has agreed to display at the top of the results list. 

Believe it or not, this isn’t always the best option for businesses trying to increase their traffic. This doesn’t mean that these results are of bad quality, but it shows that they used money to get their name out there as opposed to relying on SEO. Again, this isn’t necessarily bad, but for many search engine users, it makes content seem less appealing. In fact, organic listings (“natural”, non-paid results) receive 90% of the clicks on average. That’s a lot of people ignoring the paid ads in favor of organic search results.

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Why You Should Care About SEO

It’s both good and bad for your business that most people overwhelmingly prefer to click on links that appear organically. It’s good because it means that the amount of money you’re able to spend on promoting yourself doesn’t completely determine your search engine ranking. 

The public preference for organic results may also be “bad” in the sense that you have to put the work and the research into making your content crawl-able (able to be discovered and indexed by search engine algorithms) and to get it ranked highly in search engine results.

SEO Boosts Web Traffic

When more people are able to see your content, more people will click. Regardless of how good or bad it is, it’s a fact that SEO can have a massive effect on web traffic. Optimizing your brand's content for search engines includes optimizing it for the people using the search engines. You accomplish both of these things by:

• Making it easy for search engines to index your content.
• Making your content and web copy compelling, accessible, and shareable.
• Using topics and keywords that are based on research about search volumes and current trends.

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How Does SEO Work?

The process of indexing and ranking websites is complicated and constantly changing, as search engines decide which results to display first by going over enormous amounts of content and evaluating different factors that make it a good match for a certain search query (the words that a person types into the search box).

So, how can you use this process to your advantage and start using SEO as a marketing tool? For a lot of people, a good place to start is considering the keywords (this can include both terms and phrases) that will generate traffic and improve their rankings the most. 

SEO in Action

Conducting keyword research is only one part of the whole, and alone, it probably won’t drastically change your ranking. What it can do is help you determine what topics your desired audience cares about and how popular each of these topics are. This helps improve your content creation over time, as tracking things like high-volume searches will let you know what kind of content you should be putting out and allow you to narrow down keyword searches from there. 

This is just one example of using SEO in marketing—there are many more layers to consider, such as the purpose of your content, the usability of your website and its interface, and the general user experience you provide. There are some great SEO tools available, and there are also many SEO experts and analysts that can help you refine your content and raise your ranking.

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The Bottom Line..

Search engine optimization should not be overlooked as a useful marketing tool. Clicks mean web traffic, and web traffic means business. You can learn more about how to increase your visibility with SEO and other marketing tactics in Module 10 of the Madak Guide. To get a preview of what the Madak Guide is all about, check out Module 1 for free today.