Every day, we are bombarded with email marketing campaigns, sponsored content, and social media marketing. While these tactics are effective, they are also quite repetitive. If you’re anything like me, you may start to feel a little lackluster when it comes to marketing. You want to come up with an original idea that will make your emails stand out from the pile, but don’t know where to start.

Enter search engine optimization (SEO). What is SEO you ask?

Well, SEO is the practice of designing content to rank highly in search engine results. Essentially, SEO is the process of optimizing your content (such as web pages) to make them appear relevant and helpful to your target audience. You’re reading this article, right? Therefore, I assume you’re interested in learning more about SEO and how you can implement it into your marketing strategy.

Why Should You Try SEO For Your Marketing Campaigns?

If you’re not familiar, Google is the most popular search engine in the world. It gets about 2.7 billion searches per day. So, if you’re not ranked well on Google, you’re not going to appear in the organic (unpaid) results (more on this below). I’ll give you some examples of how SEO can benefit your marketing.

SEO Can Be Integrated In All Areas of your Business

You may be wondering how SEO can be integrated into your marketing strategy. Well, SEO can be implemented across the board in your business whether you work in digital marketing, websites, or SEO software such as HubSpot. In fact, you can use SEO in all areas of your business, not just marketing. Below, I’ll list some of the benefits of SEO.

1. Better Visibility On-Page

If you’re wondering why your web pages aren’t appearing in the search engine results, cross-referencing is often the answer. For example, if you’ve got a retail website that sells t-shirts, when someone searches for “t-shirt,” your web page probably shows up as the first result. However, if you’ve never heard of cross-referencing, it can be kind of confusing. Simply put, cross-referencing helps search engines understand what a specific word or phrase means. So, if you’d like your website to appear more often in the search engine results for your chosen keywords, do some research and implement some cross-referencing on your web pages.

2. Find The Right Keywords For Your Content

An important step to ranking well on Google is determining the right keywords for your content. Before I get into how to find the right keywords, I want to clarify that SEO is an ongoing process that requires some research and testing to be done effectively. Once you’ve implemented some cross-referencing on your content, you can begin to see the results of your SEO strategies. However, it can take some time to determine the proper keywords for your content. You don’t want to rush this step and pick the first few words that come to mind, hoping that they’ll magically become “the” keywords for your content.

When performing keyword research, you want to determine the monthly search volume for your chosen keywords. Simply put, monthly search volume is the number of searches performed per month for a specific keyword. For example, if you wanted to promote a new restaurant in your area, you could input the keyword “restaurant” into Google and look at the results to see how many people are searching for it each month. You can use free tools like Google Keyword Planner to easily find the monthly search volume for any keyword.

3. Increase Organic Traffic To Your Site

If you want to achieve superior results from your SEO strategies, you’ll need to focus on increasing the organic traffic to your site. Organic traffic is website traffic that comes from unpaid (or nearly-unpaid) search results on major search engines such as Google and Bing. Basically, if someone clicks on an organic result and reaches the end of the page, then they’re considered to be a “prospective customer” or “actual customer.”

Organic traffic is usually free and has the potential to grow exponentially; however, it can be hard to identify what’s attracting this traffic and why they’re choosing to visit your website instead of moving on to the next website in the search results. To find out, you’ll need to implement a few techniques. First, ensure that your site is complete and has all the content needed for the search engines to properly rank it. Second, segment your organic traffic into different groups depending on the keywords they used to find your site. Third, use conversion tracking software to monitor the activities of your organic visitors.

4. Become More Inclusive

In the world of digital marketing, nobody is an island. You need to be including everyone in your strategy whether they work in social media, content strategy, or SEO. Trying to do everything yourself may be overwhelming, and it can also result in ineffective marketing. By bringing in more people from different areas of your business, you’re more likely to see effective results from your efforts.

For instance, if you’ve got a marketing person, you may want them to be focusing on outreach to existing customers while you take care of the content strategy and SEO. By doing everything yourself, you may end up wasting a lot of time acting like a robot and not taking the strategy into consideration with other parts of your business.

5. Create Longer-Lasting Brands

When you begin to see results from your SEO efforts, you’ll want to continue to expand and improve on your strategy. To do this, you need to ensure that your keywords are specific and relevant to your industry. As you expand and continue to optimize your site, you want to make sure that your chosen keywords are still relevant to your content. By doing this, you’re more likely to continue to rank well on search engine results pages. Google algorithm updates can cause your rankings to fluctuate, so you may need to revisit this step regularly to ensure that your chosen keywords are still relevant to your content.

6. Improve Customer Experience

As a business owner or manager, it’s your job to make sure that your customers have a positive experience when they visit your website or purchase your products. This is why we’ve made the transition from print to digital marketing. As the world turns to technology for everything, customers expect the same level of experience whether they’re purchasing a product in person or online. In the same way, you can’t have a good customer experience unless you have a good employee experience first.

In terms of marketing, having a positive experience with your brand means that you’ve successfully created an impression in your customers’ minds that they’ll want to interact with you. In other words, you want to create a positive association between your brand and the words/phrases that you choose. To do this, you need to create content that is both informative and interesting.

Why should you try SEO for your business? Ideally, you should be using SEO to gain visibility on the world’s biggest platforms like Google. If you’d like to improve your marketing results, you should be integrating SEO into your strategy. Good luck out there.