Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is so intertwined with digital marketing that many people often think they’re the same, however, they are different yet very related concepts. SEO is an important part of digital marketing and a great tool to help websites rank better on search engine result pages.
For Yale students that are wanting to specialize in SEO, Search Engine Optimization is a strategy that generally is beneficial to all digital marketing campaigns. Digital marketing campaigns all have SEO as an integral, base layer, of any digital initiative.
PPC marketing, for instance, allows you to place ads on Google’s search engine for the keywords that make sense for your website. However, properly optimizing your keywords using SEO in this instance, a marketer could essentially double the presence for given search phrases and increase your chances of converting visitors.
Here are some other key reasons why your digital marketing campaigns will most likely fail without SEO.
Lower Ranking
SEO strategies have different benefits, and one of them is the ranking boost your website gets. The ranking determines whether your website will get any clicks or not. If your business does not make it to Google’s first page, then people wouldn’t know about the existence of your website. You can have a great digital marketing strategy, but if your website doesn’t even make it to the first page, then it’s all waste. A good percentage of web traffic stops just on the first page of search results. Anything below it is not significant. Through SEO, you can optimize your page ranking. And without SEO, you page may be doomed to rank poorly.
Decreased Authority
Page Authority (PA) refers to the quality, relevance, trustworthiness, and credibility of a web page. Having good authority is extremely important, as it predicts the rank of your website on the search engine result page (SERP). Moz is an online SEO tool that ranks page authority, and it gives a score from 1 to 100 where 100 is the most authority. Although authority is difficult to influence, it is suggested that linking to more relevant pages can work. You can use external links from websites with great authority, which will increase your site’s authority as well. If your marketing strategy is not interested in SEO, then your site may have reduced authority.
Lower Visibility
Search visibility refers to the percentage of share of traffic you get from the ranking on internet search results. For example, if your rank is second, then through research, the total clicks per rank (CPR) you get is 24%. Your ranking determines the visibility you get, so if you ignore SEO tools and fail to pay attention to ranking, then the visibility of your site will also decrease.
You can use certain tools like SEMrush to measure your visibility. It takes all of your page rankings into consideration and gives you an overall visibility percentage. Not checking your visibility means having poor digital marketing strategy.
Less Search Traffic
In a world where all kinds of innovations are being made digitally, including the digital rebuilding of lost cities, it’s pretty easy to get traffic for your business on the internet. Search Traffic refers to the organic traffic that appears on the search engine. People who type a keyword, search through the results, and click on your site are the people who make up the traffic. Traffic is highly dependent on ranking, visibility, and authority. There are several more factors that determine your traffic, but you can control, test, analyze, and observe these factors using SEO tools. Digital marketing with no SEO tools means a minuscule amount of traffic. The best spot to aim for is the first rank, or the ‘Featured Snippet”, also known as the zero rank. These ranks yield the best traffic and revenue.
There are two types of traffic: organic and paid. Organic traffic is natural traffic, while paid traffic is artificial — one that you use as a booster. A perfect digital marketing strategy uses both of these kinds of traffic to achieve its aim.
Decreased Usability
Usability refers to on-site optimization. It is the process through which your website is relevant, pleasing to look at, informative, and responsive. These elements improve the user interface, meaning that people are more likely to stick around. Your bounce rate will be reduced, and loyalty rates will increase.
Any website that loads quickly looks nicer, contains relevant content, provides an easy-to-use model, and fits the needs will certainly rank better. Some tools like SEOptimer and MozBar are designed to help you with the correct on-site optimization.