How does SEO marketing work, and how can I use it?
How does SEO marketing work, and how can I use it?
If you’re a business owner trying to grow your online presence, you’re sure to have heard of SEO marketing, but the question I keep hearing over and over again is how does SEO marketing work?
Many of us don’t really know where to start, or what the nuts and bolts of SEO marketing really are.
If this is you, then look no further; The Thinking Cap is here to help.
We’ll walk you through what SEO marketing is, how it works, and how you can use it to improve your business’s visibility and get results.
What is SEO Marketing?
SEO Marketing (Search Engine Optimisation Marketing) is a strategy aimed at improving a website's visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs), primarily on Google, to attract more organic (non-paid) traffic.
It involves optimising various aspects of a website, as well as external factors, to ensure that it meets the criteria search engines use to rank pages.
Implementing the requirements of SEO marketing will boost your website’s ranking, showing it more favourably amongst search engine results and broadening your reach.
So that’s what it is, but how does SEO marketing work?
How does SEO marketing work?
SEO marketing comprises a number of different strategies, all of which can be built and established over time.
So, the question ‘how does SEO marketing work?’ has quite a long answer - but we’re here to walk you through it.
It’s important to say that SEO marketing is a long-term investment; it doesn’t yield immediate results like paid advertising, but over time, it can deliver sustainable and highly cost-effective results.
So, here’s how it all works and where to start.
1. Keyword Research
The first step in SEO marketing is identifying which keywords and phrases your potential customers are using to search for your products, services or information related to your business.
Think to yourself, “what would I Google if I wanted to find information about this topic?” - and that word or phrase is probably a good bet for your keyword.
If you’re stuck, tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush are commonly used to find keywords with a high search volume, and low competition.
‘Ask The Public’ is another platform which allows a certain number of free searches each day, to help you to find the keywords and phrases which the public are searching for on your given topic.
2. On-Page Optimisation
Now that you’ve found your keywords, here’s what to do with them and how to optimise your web pages:
- Content Creation: create high-quality, relevant content that is optimised for the target keywords. This includes blog posts, product descriptions, landing pages, and more, which contain your keywords in optimum places.
- Meta Tags: optimise meta titles and descriptions which are shown in search engine results to make them more appealing and relevant to both search engines and users.
- URL Structure: make sure your URLs are clean, descriptive, and contain relevant keywords.
- Header Tags: use plenty of headings and subheadings to structure content in a way that is easy for both users and search engines to understand.
- Internal Linking: link to other relevant pages within your site to help search engines crawl your site more effectively and improve user navigation.
When people ask me, ‘how does SEO marketing work?’ they’re often surprised at how simple it seems when I talk them through finding keywords and on-page optimisation.
Unfortunately, it does get more complex from here on, but by breaking it down into these simple points you’ll be able to implement these SEO marketing principles and see results over time.
3. Technical SEO
Now that your webpages themselves are fine-tuned, there are things that can be done behind-the-scenes to optimise your site as a whole.
- Site Speed: improve your page load times, as faster sites rank better.
- Mobile-Friendliness: ensure your website is optimised for mobile devices, as Google uses mobile-first indexing.
- Crawlability: make sure search engine bots can easily crawl and index the site’s pages. This includes submitting an XML sitemap and using robots.txt files properly.
- HTTPS: use a secure HTTPS connection to ensure the site is safe for users.
4. Off-Page Optimisation
There are also things that you can do to boost your SEO marketing apart from your website itself.
- Backlink Building: acquiring high-quality backlinks from reputable websites which link to your content. These act as a vote of confidence and can significantly improve a site’s authority and ranking. You can find out more about backlinks in our blog about using diverse strategies to drive website traffic.
- Social Signals: although these aren’t a direct ranking factor, active engagement on social media can indirectly affect SEO by driving traffic and increasing visibility.
- Guest Blogging: writing articles for other websites will also help you to gain backlinks and increase your site’s authority.
Linked to backlinking, we would also recommend using listing software, which allows you to instantly update your business listings across search engines, popular directories, maps, social media and even sat-navs.
At The Thinking Cap we have access to some incredibly powerful listing software which means that you can update your business photos, descriptions, opening hours and any other information in one easy-to-use dashboard. Every change you make will automatically sync the update across every platform, and regular updates can boost your local listing rankings across Google and Bing — so that's an extra incentive!
With this listing software you can also create special offers and post to multiple business directories and social media platforms including Facebook, any time you want, directly in your Listing Manager dashboard.
It’s one of the most powerful local marketing tools in the world, so if you’re interested in finding out more, you can email me with the subject SEO Listing tool, here.
5. Content Marketing
Something essential to SEO marketing is the creation and promotion of high-quality content.
Producing blogs, videos, infographics and other content streams which answer the searcher’s queries will be shared widely and linked to by other websites.
Updating your content regularly will keep your website fresh, which is another thing which search engines favour as well as keeping your audience with you.
If you’re struggling to know where to start with content creation or need some ideas for what content you could produce, head to The Thinking Cap’s resources page for great tips and guides to get you started.
6. Analytics and Reporting
SEO marketing is a long-term project which is ongoing and requires refining in response to what’s giving results.
It’s sometimes hard when people ask me ‘how does SEO marketing work?’, as they’re often hoping for a quick fix which will boost their leads.
But in reality, it’s a process of creating and refining content in response to performance - and there are some great tools out there to help you see what’s working.
Using tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other SEO software to monitor website performance, track keyword rankings and analyse traffic will allow you to adjust your strategies accordingly.
Reporting helps in understanding what’s working and what isn’t, so that your strategy can be refined over time.
How does SEO marketing work together?
Let’s pull it all together.
We’ve covered a lot of ground, and you might be wondering how all these different strategies interact. How does SEO marketing work together?
- Search Engines: Use algorithms to rank pages based on factors like relevance, authority, and user experience.
- SEO Professionals: Optimise websites to align with these ranking factors.
- Results: A well-executed SEO strategy leads to higher rankings on SERPs, which drives more organic traffic, and potentially increases conversions, from sales, to leads, to getting clients over the line.
Alongside all of this it’s good to know what Google likes and keep abreast of the latest changes. Producing helpful and relevant content is a must, so that your page gets seen at all.
If you’d like some tailored help with SEO marketing for your business, we’d love to chat more.
We’re a team of experts in marketing and online strategy, and we support countless brands in SEO marketing as well as content creation as a whole.
We’re looking to partner with more businesses who are keen to take their brand to the next level, so if this sounds like you, get in contact today and ask us, ‘how does SEO marketing work?’.
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I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post.
If you’d like further help, let’s jump on a call and have a chat.
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