The role of SEO in Digital Marketing

Marketing in times of popularity. Currently the most important thing is the content most shared, the photo with the most likes, the video with the most views and, of course, the most visited site. This trend is neither by chance nor random, as popularity is synonymous with positive factors such as engagement, visits and conversions. How do you get more people to your website? Well, SEO is your best friend that will help you.

Search Engine Optimization and why its important for websites

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the matter of optimising websites, blogs, pages or social media profiles so that they appear in better positions in virtual search engines, such as Google.

It is also known as natural SEO and focuses on the popularity of websites. Many values and algorithms are taken into account to carry out this task, however, the two basic factors for positioning a website are:

1. Authority: translates as how popular a website is. The more popular it is, the more valuable its content is to people. This is arguably the main factor used by search engines, as it is based on users’ experiences and how useful they found the page’s content.
2. Relevance: this is the connection between a page and a specific search, and not just by considering how many times each keyword appears in a text. As can be concluded from its definition, authority and relevance go hand in hand.

In a search engine, popularity is synonymous with relevant and valuable information. The more a piece of content is shared, the more visits, the more users found it useful.

SEO and SEM – what’s the difference?

Despite being quite similar, they have an essential difference that makes them completely different.

On the one hand, and mentioned, SEO is the set of techniques such as writing html code, creating and editing content, navigation on the site and other actions with the aiming to give a web page better positioning within a search engine.

SEO allows users to find sites that are useful and helpful to them due to the relevance of their content. This activity is useful for both users and search engines, as the latter will be able to understand the content and subject matter of each page, as well as its usefulness to people.

The main characteristic of SEO is that it tries to position a content in an ORGANIC way, that is to say, for free. Here, both the content and the keywords are relevant as they allow search engines to index the sites.

The people in charge of this positioning work are also called SEOs. Initially they were people whose expertise was focused on programming or web design; however, it is increasingly important that they have knowledge of marketing and communication.

On the other hand, SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a branch of digital marketing in charge of promoting paid content to increase the positioning and visits of a site within a search engine. For example, every time you do a search on Google, usually the first 2 or 3 results are SEM-optimised pages, which paid to be there, and the rest are ordered according to SEO.

SEO Categories: on-site and off-site.

On-site SEO focuses on relevance and ensuring that search engines understand the content and the page itself.

This includes SEO activities such as keyword optimization, page load time, user experience, code and even URLs. In other words, as the name implies, these are all the characteristics within the site itself that allow search engines to rank and categorise the web page.

And as its name suggests, off-site SEO focuses on all the external factors that are not related to a website but are relevant to search engines.

Here, we take into account aspects such as the quality of the links, social media, whether mentions are made in other media, the authority and relevance of the brand in media and the CTR, which is the number of clicks obtained in relation to the number of impressions of a link.

By bringing the two together you have a whole SEO strategy.

SEO Ethics: White Hat and Black Hat.

Today, popularity is king. When we search online, we rarely go beyond the first page of search results. That’s why it’s essential for a webpage to position themselves well. However, due to this, some people use unethical methods to get good positioning with little effort.

1. White Hat SEO: refers to all the practices we have described to get a good positioning in search engines, following all the guidelines set out by them. It is worth mentioning that although it is complicated and time consuming, this way of doing it is the most effective and legitimate.
2. Black Hat SEO: these are all techniques penalised by search engines as they violate the rules and achieve a good positioning in a very short amount of time. Some of these activities would be promising content in headlines that are not found within the site, keyword saturation without any sense and spamming. Despite its fast results, it is a risky technique as it can lead to penalties and eventually users may stop visiting the site because of the deception in its contents.

It is very important to remember that an SEO strategy must be based on the same strategy and communication of the company, focusing on its goals. Good positioning per se is of no use if it does not contribute something substantial to the company, which is why it is an activity that must be integrated into the rest of the company’s activities.

Another thing to keep in mind is that SEO work does not yield immediate results; it is a task that takes a lot of time and effort. With a bit of perseverance, it will be worth it in the long run.