Plus Some SEO Best Practices to Optimize Your Online Content
SEO. It’s an acronym that’s thrown around a lot in the marketing world. Many brands know that search engine optimization (SEO) is something they are told they need. But why?
Consumers have shifted en masse to online. Even brick and mortar brands have realized this trend. But the online world can be crowded, noisy, and overwhelming.
In order to be successful, you have to break through and SEO is one of the most cost effective ways to do that. It can certainly improve your visibility and searchability. But what other value does SEO provide?
Here are some reasons you need SEO for marketing, regardless of your industry or business size in order to take your brand to the next level.
The Power of Organic Search
We know that online ads can really help you jump the line and get seen, but you can’t rely on ads alone. In fact, organic search is a massive part of a brand’s online performance and a critical part of the sales funnel. Google is a juggernaut, and it is also where people go to research products and services.
Did you also know that YouTube is the second biggest search engine? Over 2 billion people access it at least once a month not just to be entertained, but to be informed and to see products in action. Many other social platforms are taking notice of this trend. For example, parent company Meta has made Facebook and Instagram more searchable than ever before in recent years.
What this means is that if you don’t focus on good SEO practices, your website, posts and videos won’t make it very high up in search results regardless of the platform.
Build Trust and Credibility
SEO can also help build trust and credibility. It is the foundation to a great website that is clean and easy to use. In order to establish that authority, you’ll need elements such as natural links and optimized page content. You’ll want to follow Google’s E-A-T guidelines. This stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, and it is not a ranking factor. Rather it is used to evaluate the quality of the content and to fight disinformation. In other words, web pages should be created to help users.
Better User Experience
With a focus on the user, SEO leads to not only more visibility, but a better user experience as well. Customers know what they want and if they can’t find it, your performance will suffer.
Leads to Understanding the Consumer Better
At the granular level, SEO helps us understand what customers want and need. These clues come through search query data, analytics, and other insights. When you understand what the consumer wants, you can deliver on that need. This in turn leads to increased engagement, traffic, and conversions.
Now that we’ve looked at how SEO can make your brand more successful, let’s take a look at some best practices.
SEO Best Practices to Optimize Your Online Content
- Do your keyword research: use tools like SEM Rush to find out what consumers are searching for
- Use keywords: in blogs, use your keyword or phrase in your title, subtitle, and opening paragraphs; in your socials ensure you use this at least once in your copy; this is to ensure that searches pull up your content as a result in a query
- Name your images: IMG005 may be what your photo library automatically names your images, but you want to use your keyword or phrase in the file name for your images as search engines also crawl this metadata to pull up relevant results
- Use alt text: fill out the alt text and other metadata fields using your keywords or phrases
- Include links: include relevant links on your website and blog
- Utilize backlinks: these are links from external sites that link to your website or blog, the more backlinks you have, the more valuable your assets are seen by search engines, helping you build authority and higher search rankings
If you want to learn more about optimizing specifically your socials for SEO, check out this helpful article.
Break Through
Are you ready to break through the noise? At Attuned, our mission is to help clients attain their goals that are both game changing and transformative. We take a holistic yet nimble approach to marketing, including focusing on SEO. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you achieve your vision, contact us today!