SEO is digital marketing

SEO should be placed at the heart of your digital marketing strategy

When it comes to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), many of us were getting websites wrong for so many years. Digital marketing has changed, and we need to too.

Setting them up for clients (or helping with my employers’ sites and content), the structure and information we published was always based on what we want to tell people about our services or the client’s products or services. We’d pull our collective hair out trying to rise up the rankings, and throw money at Pay Per Click promotion (PPC).

These days we need to incorporate SEO into our marketing plans. Starting with strategically chosen keywords, with valuable content that we have researched based on what we know our target customers are searching for, can dramatically increase your presence, and ultimately, your bottom line.

By applying a few basic processes we’ve been having some terrific results with SEO tools for clients lately.

1) Quality content is a must: check out how long users are staying on your site, and on what pages, and consider improvements

2) Optimising your content: use a keyword digital marketing strategy and make sure all pages, and blog/news posts, have that keyword in titles, sub headings, and alt-tags for images, and use external links too.

3) Pay attention to trends and new advice: use the tools like Google Analytics, Yoast on WordPress and others. Seek professional advice, read all the blogs you can on it, there are good people out there.

4) Test your site: make sure it is fast, know what words are being searched, where your traffic is coming from, how long people stay on a page, etc.

More tips are here. Consider this a long term process – you don’t get success overnight.

Anything I’ve missed? Put them in the comments below.