SEO, What is It?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In short, it is a way to allow the search engines to understand what your website is about, and allows them to rank and index your website accordingly. SEO marketing has grown significantly in the past few years and is an ever adapting practice as the internet continues to update and expand.
APRIL 2018 EDIT: Download the HubSpot 2018 SEO Myths Report
Despite how sophisticated search engines are now, they still fail at understanding text and images with the depth that a human might. SEO attempts to speak their language and bridge that gap. For instance, say you post a picture of a cat. While a human may be able to provide details of that cat such as weight, color, and other features, a search engine bot would fail miserably at doing such things. SEO marketers can help go into back ends of websites and provide search engines with those details so that the images reads to them as descriptive and effective as possible. Not to mix metaphors, but doing so entirely, data that goes into seo marketing is much like a primer to paint,it is not visible, but it helps make the desired color of paint smoother, and more visible (if that’s what primer actually does. I don’t know.)
This all relies on content, though. A constant update of content to be optimized, and improvements on the webpage need to be maintained. Neglect of a website means that there isn’t anything for search engines to be reading, and they can get quite bored if there’s nothing new for them to do.
Why should you care?
Benefits of Google AdWords and Analytics
Setting and defining a budget for sponsored ads and google ad campaigns is not a bad idea. With Google AdWords some of the benefits include being able to target your ads to specific demographics to help ensure that the right people (the people you’re attempting to reach based on various variables such as interests, age, income, etc) are going to be exposed to your ads, it allows you to control your costs so that you do not exceed your budget, has analytic tools that help you measure your success (allows you to see if your ad was clicked and bounced, or clicked and converted), and allows you to manage your campaign so that if things aren’t working the way you desire you can make adjustments accordingly.
Google Analytics offers detailed insights to your web-traffic, such as where people are viewing your website from, what kind of device, where the traffic is coming from etc., all of this insight allows you to better understand where efforts should be placed in targeting people and extending your services and where might be a ghost land (for example, Google+ is notoriously a ghost land in terms of social media, one could think it’s great and spend a lot of their time attempting to market there thinking it’s a good idea, but analytics will show you that, in fact, 99% of your target demographic uses Twitter which you’ve been ignoring – this allows you to understand where to go to talk to ‘the people’)
Search Engine Marketing
Fresh, updated content is vital for seo efforts. Without content, there is no point in seo after an initial audit and list of suggestions for the site. Making sure that the proper tags are in place is important, but continuing to adjust, monitor, and research seo trends both nationally and within your website are vital. As content comes in, it needs to be optimized, as websites are built, it needs to be optimized, and then after it is optimized it needs to be carefully observed and analyzed to get a clear understanding of trends that exist within your websites traffic.
Blog writing, social updates, and seo article writing are important for this effort.
With seo marketing, an important factor to remember is that it requires constant monitoring, analyzing, and reporting back on those findings. From monitoring you begin to realize what is resonating with your audience and target demographic and what isn’t. It also helps you reach those people that don’t know yet that they need to be seeing your content.