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What is SEO Marketing?

SEO Marketing (Search Engine Optimization) is an inbound digital marketing strategy that focuses on driving organic (unpaid) search traffic to your website by improving its visibility in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). The best website builders have built-in SEO features to make this process easier.

What does SEO Marketing do?

SEO marketing helps companies rank higher on search engines like Google for their target keywords – the words and phrases that their target customers type into search engines. This, in turn, can help drive more qualified traffic to your website and generate new leads for your business.

There are several branches of SEO marketing including:

• Onpage SEO. This includes optimizing the content of your web pages for target keywords and relevant ranking factors. For example, it may be necessary to ensure that the content is formatted correctly, with appropriate heading tags, alt text, and internal / external links.
• Offpage SEO. This includes actions taken outside of your website to improve your domain authority and organic ranking positions, such as: B. Backlink building and social media marketing.
• Technical SEO. The backend of your website is optimized in order to meet the technical requirements of search engines like Google. For example, steps can be taken to reduce page load times by minimizing code, or redirects can be set up to maintain link equity.
• Keyword research. All good SEO marketing strategies start with careful keyword research. Keyword research finds viable, high-volume queries that your target customers search for using tools like Google Adwords, and then validates them.

How departments can use SEO marketing

SEO is primarily the responsibility of the marketing department. In some cases, however, your marketing team may also need a small contribution from people in your IT and sales departments.

SEO marketing is the responsibility of the marketing department, but cross-departmental collaboration may also be required (Photo credit: Fouxels on Unsplash)

The marketing department will do most of the SEO work. You are responsible for putting together your SEO strategy, doing keyword research, creating SEO content and implementing offpage, onpage and technical SEO.

Often large companies devote part of their marketing budget specifically to SEO and even employ a team of dedicated SEO marketers. This team can consist of a variety of roles, including content strategists, outreach specialists, and content writers.

Some companies choose to outsource their SEO campaigns to third parties instead of doing them in-house.

SEO also involves making sure that your website is well optimized behind the scenes. Your website code, XML sitemaps, and hosting server all have SEO implications – and all of this is the responsibility of your IT department.

For example, if your servers are too slow, it can affect the loading speed of your page (an important SEO ranking factor). Your IT team is responsible for taking care of the backend of your website and making sure it doesn’t become a problem.

The leads you generate through SEO ultimately end up in your sales department. You are responsible for nurturing leads you generate through inbound marketing and guiding them through your sales funnel.

Hence, you should seek input from your sales team when putting together an SEO marketing strategy. For example, they can help you review keyword priorities and pick the ones that will bring the most qualified traffic.

Features and Benefits of SEO Marketing

How Much Does SEO Marketing Cost?

There are no flat rates for SEO marketing – you have to calculate your own costs based on your needs and goals (Image credit: Getty)

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how much SEO marketing costs because it depends on many factors including the size of your campaign, your marketing goals, and the keywords you want to rank for.

Third-party SEO service providers usually offer several different SEO packages that are priced independently of each other. For example, they can offer SEO audits, local SEO services, keyword research services, backlink building services, and more.

Usually you will have to contact the SEO service provider to request a quote tailored to your needs, but some companies also offer set packages at a fixed price. These packages can include things like page optimization, keyword research, XML sitemap creation and submission, reporting, and content creation.

Depending on what’s included, packages can start as low as $ 500 per month on the low end to $ 5,000 per month or more on the high end of the market.

One of the main SEO service providers that is outsourced is backlinks building. Some backlink service providers only charge $ 50 per high authority backlink, while others charge $ 500 or more. Be wary of cheap backlinks as they can come from bad domains that can get you Google penalties and affect your ranking positions.

If you’d rather take care of SEO in-house, you probably want to spend between 10% and 50% of your total digital marketing budget on SEO. Expect to pay more than $ 30-40,000 annually to hire an SEO specialist.

Many solo preneurs choose to take care of SEO themselves. In this case, the only cost involved is your time.

SEO Marketing FAQ

Here are the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about SEO marketing.

How is SEO used in marketing?

SEO is used as a long-term inbound marketing strategy. Marketers use it to make their target website pages more visible on search engine results pages, thus increasing organic search traffic to the domain.

Usually this includes optimizing the website and pages around the Google ranking factors, such as:

• Alignment with search intent. Google’s RankBrain helps understand the context and intent behind user searches. Content that corresponds to this intent has the best chance of ranking.
• Backlinks. The more relevant, authoritative, and natural backlinks you have from different referring domains, the better.
• Core Web Vitals. These are a set of metrics that measure page experience by, for example, studying how fast content is loading on your website and how unstable it is.

It can take months to see results from your SEO marketing campaigns. You can track your performance over time with analytics tools (Photo credit: Stephen Phillips at Unsplash)

What is SEO Marketing and How Does It Work?

Search engines like Google use complex algorithms to determine the order in which website pages are ranked for different search queries. The goal of the search engine is to put the most relevant answers from the most trusted sources at the top of the page that best match the search intent.

To achieve this goal, every time a user performs a search query, the algorithm crawls all the pages in the search engine’s database and selects the most relevant, trustworthy and authoritative. This is done by looking at various ranking factors.

The job of SEO marketers is to optimize your website and content around these ranking factors so that the algorithm will get your pages to the top.

What does SEO stand for in marketing?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is not to be confused with SEM (search engine marketing) which only focuses on paid search traffic.

What exactly is SEO?

An example of SEO would be editing existing content on one of your website pages to optimize it around a specific keyword. For example, you can add the target keyword to the title, first subheading and meta description, or change the URL structure to include your main keyword.

Another example of SEO is guest posting on industry-relevant blogs to build backlinks and improve your domain authority.

An example of SEO would be editing existing content on one of your website pages to optimize it around a specific keyword. For example, you can add the target keyword to the title, first subheading and meta description, or change the URL structure to include your main keyword.

Another example of SEO is guest posting on industry-relevant blogs to build backlinks and improve your domain authority.

Main takeaways

• SEO marketing is a low cost digital marketing channel that can help you generate tons of website visits by increasing your organic visibility in the SERPs.
• In addition to lead generation, SEO marketing can help increase brand awareness and support your paid advertising campaigns.
• SEO marketing is a broad discipline that encompasses many different practices including on-page SEO, off-page SEO, content creation, keyword research, and more.
• SEO is the responsibility of the marketing department, but may occasionally require input from your IT and sales departments.
• SEO marketing is a complex discipline with many moving parts. Many companies choose to outsource it to SEO specialists, with costs ranging from $ 500 to $ 5000 per month.

Continue reading

Would you like to learn more? Find out why many companies still overlook the importance of SEO and discover other ways to increase traffic to your website.

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