Marketing is an integral part of your business. It drives potential customers to your online platforms, as well as promoting brand awareness and quality of products or services.
However, there is more to marketing than a fancy website (see our previous blog post), paying for adverts and printing flyers. There is a lot of theory and groundwork behind effective marketing.
One key marketing step is to ensure that your web content, blogs, and any online marketing material take into consideration SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
What is SEO?
In the modern business world the holy grail of online marketing is to get your brand to the top of page one of Google.
SEO can help you get there.
SEO is the means for ensuring that the content on your online platforms is picked up by search-engine algorithms and therefore considered ‘relevant’.
In its simplest form SEO is about keywords and ensuring these are present in the content of your online platforms.
So for example if someone is searching for “Web Designer, Oxford” this is what they may type into Google.
If these words don’t appear on your website it won’t get picked up by the algorithm, and therefore your site won’t be put on page one of Google.
However, with SEO you also need to consider what other things someone searching for “Web Designer, Oxford” might also require. They may also search for “SEO Content,” “Managed Chat” or “Web Hosting.”
Therefore in order to appear in more related searches, such keywords need to be present in your online copy.
Background SEO
In addition to ensuring all the visible content on your online platforms includes SEO keywords, there is a lot of work in the background that will also help with your ranking on Google.
When writing every aspect of your website for example, SEO needs to be at the forefront of your mind, even for;
Headings – both primary and secondary
URL – the actual web address needs to contain keywords
Image names – image1.jpeg is a common but poor example. You need to put effort in and name the images with keywords in mind
Image titles – ‘John at home’ would be a poor title. You need one that reflects what people search for
How to implement SEO into your marketing strategy
As with most things you can write SEO copy yourself. There are a number of keyword search applications available which identify the searches potential customers have made which would be relevant to your business or the specific topic in hand.
Even with an application this can be time consuming.
Then you need to be able to write the copy you require, incorporating the SEO keywords whilst at the same time making it sound natural and organic. This is the difficult bit as people search for keywords “Web Designer Oxford”, but in natural speak it would be “Web Designer in Oxford.” Combining the two is a specialist skill.
As you can imagine this is a time consuming and complex process, and therefore most people will outsource this to an SEO Marketing Agency.
If you are serious about getting traffic to your website and increasing your business, SEO is one of the things worth investing in.
Once you have high traffic to your online platforms then you can further invest in bespoke websites, or Melu managed live chat which will ensure every visitor to your site has the opportunity to become a customer.