Why does SEO matter in marketing?
Hannah Ferris, SEO (search engine consultant) consultant, HK Marketing, talks to us about why SEO (search engine consultant) is important and how best to use it as part of an effective marketing strategy.
What is SEO and how important is SEO?
SEO is the process of improving a website’s visibility in a search engine. Predominantly that’s Google, and the aim is to improve where your website is ranked organically in Google. With paid advertising becoming more and more expensive, giving SEO the right amount of focus is crucial for ROI (return on investment).
How does SEO work?
SEO works best within a content strategy combined with other aspects of marketing, like conversion optimisation, the user experience of a website, paid ad campaigns, seasonal campaigns and product launches, etc.
There are many different things you can do to optimise your website. The most well-known one is to ensure you’re publishing high-quality content and that all the keywords are in there. The first step would be to do keyword research, find out what search phrases people are using, and then make sure your website is optimised across every single page – not just your home page and top-level landing pages. With the introduction of Google Gemini, keywords within your content can be a little more conversational, with wording loosely based around the keywords, rather than ‘keyword stuffing’, which is now considered an old-hat tactic, used to cheat the algorithms.
It’s not just about the text, it also comes down to design and CRO (conversion rate optimisation) strategies: how people are using your website and how SEO can be linked in with that.
As well as on-page SEO, there is off-page SEO, which is all the link building and trying to ensure that other, preferably high-authority, websites are linking back to your website.
The Google algorithms do update quite frequently, and in turn, the strategies used for SEO do need to change as well, which can make it challenging.
Do go back to your older blog posts and content across your website and make sure that it’s constantly updated and refreshed – so Google will see that your website is relevant.
How has AI affected the SEO landscape?
That’s one of the biggest trends for this year: making sure websites are optimised for all the AI (artificial intelligence) tools that are out there – optimising the product detail a bit more and being more descriptive on product pages. It’s a case of putting more information and images out there. Video is going to be a huge focus for the AI tools, so getting more content on YouTube and other platforms like TikTok is going to help with your SEO. Podcasts can also help your SEO by increasing your brand visibility and driving traffic to your website.
What else can an organisation do to make sure their website is optimised for Google?
Back-end SEO work is important – the metadata, the title tags, meta descriptions, and making sure they’re optimised to the keywords that you’re using and that every image on a website has got an alt tag, which also includes keywords. All of this can be uncovered through a technical SEO audit.
You can run your website through various online tools that will flag up areas for improvement. These tools give your website a score, and then you can work to get that score as close to 100% as possible with all these different tactics.
What software can companies use to help them with SEO?
A free tool which is useful for SEO is the Google Ads Keyword Planner. All you need for that is a Google Ads account – you don’t have to be spending money on Google Ads to use the tool. You put in a phrase, it will throw up loads of example key phrases, and it will tell you average numbers for how many people search every month for each of those phrases.
There are plenty of paid tools for doing SEO audits, like Semrush, Surfer SEO and Moz. There’s also Google Search Console and GA4 (Google Analytics 4), which are free tools you can use to track how much traffic your website is getting purely from organic search and where your website is positioned in Google for any user search queries.
What’s the best way to search engine optimise an article?
Best practice is to think about SEO when you’re planning the topic and to make sure the title and theme are geared to keywords that your audiences are using. And then you need to know the intent of those keywords. For instance, you could have a ‘How to…?’ as a title, and then you can answer the question in bullet points – that tends to work well. And doing that will help the article be in featured snippets in Google.
More in-depth, informative pieces, such as this one, are equally valuable. It depends on the business and the topic. Make sure you have your keywords in your heading (H1) and in your subheading, which we call H2.
Why is link building important for SEO?
Link building for SEO is getting increasingly important and is the process of getting your website link on other people’s websites – that tells Google your website has authority because other people are talking about it. As you can imagine, the best link building is from publications. Companies can’t always afford expensive advertorials or PR agencies who will help them get seen in publications. So, another great way of ensuring your website is linked from another site is through case studies, or client stories. Internal links between your own articles and webpages are also important for SEO and putting links to your blog posts on social media. Do address any broken links.
Are there any other SEO trends people need to be aware of?
As mentioned, video is becoming more valuable for SEO. Informational, resource-led content is also becoming increasingly important year on year. It needs to go beyond just posting a blog once a month for the sake of it. Think of content that answers your audience’s questions. With AI, anyone can take some content and turn it into their own. But Google’s not going to really value that, and neither is the user. Try to ensure that every content piece has a goal and is original and relevant. Use AI as an aid rather than a tool to create all your content.
What is search engine marketing (SEM) and how is it different from SEO?
Search engine marketing includes SEO but is focused on your website’s full visibility in Google and therefore also includes paid search advertising and Google Business Profile. SEO is solely focused on improving the organic (non-paid) search ranking of your website for relevant user keywords.
Why would a life sciences organisation outsource SEO services?
One of the challenges of SEO is that it’s an ongoing process – not just doing the audit and fixing issues that the auditing tool throws up but doing regular keyword research and looking at the competitiveness – so it can be incredibly time consuming. People within organisations might not have the time, knowledge or the experience to run an effective SEO strategy. And what might work for one business, might not work for another – there’s no one size fits all. Hiring an expert, an SEO consultant, who’s worked with different industries, is going to really help improve your website ranking and visibility.
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HK Marketing is one of Lean Creative Marketing’s network of partners. If you need any SEO support, no matter how big or small your organisation is, look no further: get in touch today.
