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Written by Professional Academy Guest Blogger Shawn Byrne
Just like the way digital marketing has grown in importance for business in general, search engine optimization or SEO has become integral to the success of any digital marketing strategy. Considering how digital marketing is all about driving customers to a specific business through online platforms, it’s hard to imagine how a given digital marketing strategy will ever take off, much less succeed without SEO.
SEO is essentially a huge collection of techniques that help any given website gain traffic and rank high in search engine results, which can later be parlayed into conversions. Here are some of those SEO techniques that digital marketers have been using over the years to great effect.
For small businesses and local mom-and-pop shops, local SEO is the way to go. Instead of competing with virtually countless other similar enterprises in the world, small businesses get a much better chance of getting seen and ranked in search engines by optimizing for local searches. Including city and state in title tags, meta descriptions, the URL, and H1 headings are common techniques used when optimizing locally.
In a world where just about everyone is in a hurry, a slow-loading website is perhaps one of the most frustrating things ever. When a page takes forever to load, users aren’t going to wait; They’ll just move on to another site, effectively increasing your page bounce rate.
Boosting website speed can be done by compressing images, cutting down on redirects, avoiding using custom fonts, etc. With a faster website, you should be able to improve your page bounce rate and help you achieve your marketing targets.
Landing pages, particularly optimized ones, have long proven to be an effective tool for generating leads and conversions. As long as it has a strong headline, a great image, a clear offer, and call-to-action, your optimized landing page should be able to help you immensely with your lead generation efforts.
When your digital marketing strategy involves YouTube videos, it only makes sense to optimize them as well. After all, videos on YouTube almost always get much better rankings on Google compared to those on other platforms. So optimize your videos by adding video titles, descriptions, thumbnails, and length, as they all contribute to making your content more visible on Google helping increase site traffic for your business.
Some people say guest posting as an SEO technique is dead, but they could never be more wrong. Guest posting remains a potent tool in a digital marketer’s arsenal.
When you post on other sites (with their permission, of course), you get to present your content and your brand in front of a new audience. Accepting guest posts, on the other hand, will allow you to benefit from the traffic that followers of your guest posters will bring when they check out the content their favorite blogger contributed to your site. They might even become regular visitors of your site if they like the content enough.
Considering the fact that mobile users now outnumber desktop users, it’s a no-brainer for digital marketers to make sure their websites are optimized for mobile. After all, more than half of all Internet traffic today comes from mobile devices, and it’s bound to increase with the passing years. It goes without saying that digital marketers need to make sure they have to get a piece of that massive mobile pie by making their sites responsive.
Keyword research has been a foundation of SEO from the very beginning. These days, however, keyword research is not just about SEO, although it has been inextricably linked with optimization for a very long time. Keyword research is also an essential component of all digital marketing since keywords should always serve as a guide for any good digital marketing strategy at every stage. Fortunately for digital marketers, there is a wealth of keyword research tools available today, from the Google Keyword Planner to the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer.
Content is king, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon, not when Google has declared that high-quality content is a top ranking factor. It is imperative for digital marketers that the businesses they’re campaigning for only feature content that provides real value to users. Anything less would make it a target for penalties by Google, and no digital marketers worth their salt will ever want that.
The above techniques are by no means comprehensive, but incorporating any or all of them into your digital marketing strategy will, without a doubt, yield results. Just remember that SEO is for the long term, and that also applies to the SEO techniques used to enhance one’s digital marketing efforts.
About The Author
Shawn Byrne is the founder and CEO of My Biz Niche, an Arizona-based digital marketing company that has achieved superior results for their clients. Before My Biz Niche, Shawn worked for Venture Capitalists building a private portfolio of e-commerce and informational websites generating revenue through various digital marketing strategies.
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