SEO is a major player in the world of digital marketing and for good reason. SEO is an essential part of any marketing strategy, but it can be a complex and tricky tactic to get your head around if you aren’t familiar with it.
Luckily, there are SEO specialists, like Sure Oak, with years of experience in every nuance of SEO to take care of the hard work for you.
But before you take the leap to hiring an SEO specialist, it’s worth knowing the basics: What it involves, what the benefits are, and whether it’s a suitable marketing tool for your business.
What is SEO?
A good starting point is clarifying what SEO actually stands for. It’s short for Search Engine Optimisation. In basic terms, that means improving your site to increase its visibility for relevant searches on search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing.
This is achieved by optimising web pages and their content – hence the name! We’ll take a look at what kind of optimisation techniques this involves later in the article.
Why is SEO important?
Search engines are incredibly powerful marketing tools for your business – after all, who do you know that would pick up the yellow pages to find a service or product? Very few people do these days.
Thanks to search engines like Google, it’s never been easier to find what you need in a few clicks on the internet, so it’s imperative that your business can be found by potential customers when they search for a service or product online.
Best of all, unlike the likes of paid marketing tactics such as PPC, gaining organic traffic is completely free. It’s just a case of knowing how to attract it.
Not sure what organic traffic is? Here’s a quick summary of organic traffic and the opposite of it within digital marketing, paid traffic.
- Organic traffic refers to potential customers who are discovering your website through search engines such as Google, at no cost to you.
- Paid traffic refers to potential customers who are discovering your website through paid ads (the clue’s in the name – paid traffic is far more expensive to achieve than organic traffic, which is free).
If you do SEO well, search engines will recognise the value of your website to users and it will be ranked highly on the likes of Google, placing it in the perfect position for users to discover your website when they perform a Google search.
If SEO is done poorly, your website may not be picked up by search engines and organic traffic will remain the same as it did before.
Not only is this frustrating, it’s also a huge waste of time, because SEO is a long-term, ongoing process that can take months or even years to implement. Imagine having put in all that hard work to not reap the rewards!? That’s why it’s always best to hire an SEO expert who knows exactly what they’re doing.
Is SEO the best tool for generating long-term revenue?
Absolutely! And here’s why.
While SEO is one of the cheapest digital marketing strategies, it also receives the longest-term results, which is what makes it such a desirable tool to marketers. While it normally takes a few months to see the benefits of SEO in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), it will generate long-term revenue.
That’s because when Google starts to display your website highly in search results, you’ll be visible to potential customers throughout the whole time Google is open – which is 24/7!
Google doesn’t do weekends or holidays, so your website will be appearing to customers around the clock, meaning once you’ve put the hard work in you can reap the rewards passively, i.e. letting the traffic roll in naturally.
Having said that, SEO is a long-term process that does require patience and ongoing commitment. It doesn’t start driving traffic or leads straight away, and it’s important to continually improve and optimize your site, even when you start to see results.
Why does SEO take so long to implement?
The digital world is becoming more and more fast-paced, so SEO is somewhat of an outlier in this respect. SEO takes longer to implement for a few key reasons, including.
- Set-up takes time.
- Google is slow
- You’re competing against a lot of other sites.
Set-up takes time
There’s a lot that comes with SEO. From content creation to keyword research, HTML code optimisation and everything in between, it easily becomes a full-time job.
Alongside this, your SEO strategy should ideally coincide with various other digital marketing strategies including social media marketing, PPC, user experience design, and conversion rate optimization (CRO).
If you’re trying to run a full SEO strategy on the side while juggling your main business then you’ll struggle, to say the least. That’s why it’s important to have someone who can fully dedicate themselves to setting up your SEO strategy in the most effective way possible. Find SEO services near me.
Google is slow
As of May 2021, there are 1,858,173,544 websites in the world – and that number is increasing every second. It’s no wonder then, that it can take search engines some time to discover new websites.
Google has to categorise the entire internet, which isn’t a 5 minute job by any means. As one of the billions of websites for Google to discover, yours will just have to wait patiently in line before it gets to you. And that’s that.
You’re competing against a lot of other sites
If you were the only one who was well versed in the art of SEO then you’d probably be a millionaire, but that’s not the case. The harder your competitors work with their SEO tactics, the harder you’ll need to work to surpass them.
After all, if you’re all going for the same high-value keywords, there can only be one website in position 1 of search results.
Nonetheless, if you don’t adopt an SEO strategy for your website you’ll be missing out on the opportunity to be organically found by endless customers who are proactively seeking your service. So regardless of the hard work that needs to be put into SEO, the rewards will massively outweigh it.
Should you hire an SEO specialist?
While it’s possible to educate yourself about SEO and implement your own SEO tactics, good SEO requires a range of skills including web analytics, web design and development, marketing, and content creation – not to mention years of experience! It’s simply not a job that can be done ‘on the side.’
However, if you’re trying to implement SEO on a budget then there are a few basic SEO strategies you can employ that require little to no technical experience, including adding metadata to your pages and images, optimising page titles and customising your URLS.
If you’ve got a flair for writing this will also work in your favour, as you’ll be able to contribute towards publishing content that adds value to customers through using long-tail keywords. This is a fairly straightforward way to contribute to improving your organic search engine rankings.
Although, it’s important that your content is rich with the keywords that you want to target which does require knowledge of how to conduct and carry out keyword research.
If you’re going for those high-value, competitive keywords then it’s best to leave it to the experts if you want a chance of surpassing your competition. They’ll know exactly which keywords your competitors are targeting, using this information to create your own keyword targeting strategy to help you overcome them.
An SEO expert will also be able to conduct a thorough SEO audit at the start of the project to help establish areas of weakness and actions to improve them.
To sum up
Any serious digital marketing strategy should consider SEO due to its huge potential for generating long-term revenue at a relatively cheap cost.
While SEO is a complicated and complex field which really requires an expert approach to see the greatest return on investment, there are a few small actions you can take to boost your SEO, even with no experience.
If you want to get the most out of your SEO then there’s no better option than hiring an SEO specialist to ensure that it’s reaching its full potential.
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