What is SEO Marketing?

SEO marketing also referred to as Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing the visibility of a website on search engine results pages. There are many factors that need to be taken into consideration as a part of your strategy. A solid strategy considers more than just keywords.

As a general rule of thumb, sites that appear higher up in the results will get more traffic to their pages, and so potentially more business. Your goal is to get to page one and ideally to position one, but whether that is feasible largely depends on the market that you are operating in. If you’re in the mobile phone space or travel, you’ll be fighting a losing battle unless you’ve got a sizeable budget to spend. However, if you’re offering a niche product or a service in a defined geographical area, you stand a pretty good chance of at least getting to page one if you are patient and follow these basic principles.

How SEO Can Help Your Business Grow

Whether you are a local contractor or a brick and mortar store that sells products, you should have a website. More importantly, you should be getting traffic to your website via the search engines. Having a website without getting any traffic to it is like having a car without any gas in it. You can get more traffic to your website by optimizing it in a way that allows the search engines to display your site for search queries that are likely to bring you high quality customers.

There is no doubt about it: consumers turn to Google when they don’t know where to find the products or services they are searching for. Google makes it extremely convenient to find what you are looking for with their extremely robust search engine.

So if you think you can outperform your competitors without doing search engine marketing, chances are you are wrong. Businesses all over the world are rapidly growing because of how popular search engines have become. If you have a one of a kind product that is well known for its brand, then you may not be interested in using SEO for lead generation — but in most cases, a business that has competitors needs to be found on search engines in order to stay ahead of the competition.

With an effective search engine optimization strategy in place, you can not only improve your search engine rankings but also increase your customer base and save on the marketing cost. Search engine optimization is not a quick fix but a permanent one for your online marketing needs. With consistency and time, it will hardly take 6 months for a well-optimized website to reach in the top position.

Expert Advice: I would suggest breaking down your search engine optimization strategy into two parts:

  • Local SEO: Initially target getting higher rankings for local searches. This way you will be able to beat bigger businesses that are not within your location of business.
  • Standard SEO: Once you are done with Local SEO, you can start off with the standard SEO practices to reach a wider audience. If your business is restricted to a certain location such as a restaurant then probably you won’t have the need of going beyond local SEO techniques. But, if you are selling products to an international audience then you will have to undertake techniques to boost your rankings on the international front as well.