SEO is frequently used and widely misunderstood as a term. However, SEO is a widely valuable tool in your marketing kit and one that could provide significant benefits in generating and nurturing leads.
Here, we cover a broad overview of SEO, such as what it is, how it helps, and how an SEO strategy looks. Understanding SEO’s capabilities is crucial to leverage it to achieve your goals.
Knowing What SEO Is
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the process of designing your posts, blogs, or website content for search engines to find it easily.
Just think about how you find things in your personal life. If you need a new tool or to complete an unfamiliar task, you’ll likely search online for a solution, unless you know someone with knowledge. The entries that come up in your results are the ones that rank highest in SEO, which they achieve with a combination of techniques like keywords and in-depth descriptions to establish comprehensive expertise.
SEO helps you gain more online attention and increases lead generation, helping customers find you by showing up in their searches. The higher your results appear in search engine results pages, also called SERPs, the more you demonstrate your credibility online. By optimizing your page, you help web crawlers—search engine bots that navigate sites to determine relevance—see that you know your stuff and reliably share information.
However, it takes significant time and effort to build a site that will rank for SEO. Optimizing your site does help, but you can make use of your blogs and video content as sales enablement tools, which you share with prospects and potential customers. The primary goal of any content strategy is to help people find solutions to their pain points. Even if you rank well with search engines, your performance relies on providing value to the people you want to reach.
How To Launch an SEO Strategy
SEO strategies depend on your industry and business. Some mediums benefit from visual guides, like video, whereas thought leadership can flourish as well through blogs and podcasts.
That said, there is a general guideline to developing materials, even if you’ll make things unique to you. You can determine your strategy with this checklist:
- Determine who you want to reach
- Decide what you want to promote
- Create a list of keywords
- Develop a content calendar
- Write and publish posts (either in-house or outsourced)
- Track analytics and adjust
SEO Is a Valuable Strategy
SEO's has immense value because it empowers customers with knowledge and information. Providing them with that knowledge makes them trust you because it establishes your expertise. Creating quality materials that concisely inform and advise customers helps you rise above the noise and competition to resonate with the people that matter most to your business. Companies that combine SEO with traditional tactics like radio reach a higher brand strength that helps their search efforts. Customers who know the brand will often search for them by name directly, often bypassing their products or services in searches.
To learn more about SEO and how to develop your strategy, check out the complete blog on our sister site, Federated Digital Solutions.
