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There are several ways to get traffic to your website. You’ve got paid ads, social media posts, emails — just to name a few. With billions of searches happening on Google every single day, the more ways you can try to drive people to your site organically, the better.
Regardless of what digital marketing tactics you’re using, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vital ingredient in that recipe for success. Quality SEO is one of the most effective and cost-efficient ways to increase your brand visibility and understand your customers. Without it, marketers are fighting an uphill battle in terms of making connections, building trust, and creating loyalty.
So we’re diving deeper into the importance of SEO, what that looks like during the production process, and important tips to help you maximize your efforts.
Why is SEO So Important?
There are plenty of reasons why your marketing strategy should include SEO, each with their own unique influence in achieving your goals. Here are a few of the most important:
Search is the primary source of traffic. Organic search is both critical to the buyer funnel and a business website’s performance. With Google owning a massive stake of the search market, being highly visible on it and other trusted search engines (Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.) is hugely beneficial. And SEO is a vital part of their guidelines to ensure that happens.
Builds trust and credibility. There are several elements that help you establish authority on Google, and positive user behavior is one of them. When your SEO is strong and relevant, it lays the foundation for a trusted and credible website. And if users are properly directed to your site with the right information and a quality experience, they’ll keep coming back again and again.
Allows you to understand the voice of your customer. Search query data, SERP (search engine results page), and analytics and AI insights all provide very useful information about your customers’ behaviors and intent — which help you understand how to speak to them in your marketing.
Helps you understand the digital environment. Given the digital landscape now changes daily, staying on top of SEO can help you stay in the loop when it comes to everything your competitors and industry is doing in regard to search. The more you know, the more competitive you’ll be.
It creates a better customer experience. User experience (UX) should be every marketer’s #1 priority. Before you can have maximum visibility, you have to deliver a favorable customer experience. Google knows how to interpret what that actually means and has made it an essential element of a website’s success.
It’s a long-term strategy. While instant gratification is great, long-lasting success is even better. SEO can take up to a year to have a noticeable impact, but the results can last for several years. The time and effort you commit to it and staying on top of changing trends, the more valuable the results will be.
It Impacts the buying cycle. Research is a big part of the consumer buying process. 77% of consumers believe real-time personalization is crucial (Search Engine Journal), so if your content isn’t meeting them in decision-making moments, you’re losing a lead. SEO helps brands be visible with relevant content during this important research phase of the sales funnel.
What Does SEO Mean in Terms of Digital Production?
A smart SEO strategy starts with a deep understanding of your website’s goals and top KPIs. And then it follows with a comprehensive website audit to see if you’re fulfilling them — and how you could be.
“The very first thing we do is try to understand what the company’s main goals are for the website and what conversions they’re looking for,” Ricardo Chamberlain, Assemble Head of Web Development and Operations, explained. “For most transactional websites, that’s easy. But for others, is it to have people fill out a form? Download a document? Watch a video? Then we work with them to understand who their audience is — what are their interests? Their online behaviors? Where are they located? And we use Google Analytics to support this data. If the company thinks their target audience is mostly local, but analytics shows a majority of it coming from other cities, then this will of course impact the people our SEO will target moving forward. By building audience personas using this information, we can ensure our SEO is reaching the right consumers.”
This information also helps developers know how that translates to a website. Is the audience typically less tech savvy, so easy navigation is key? Are they older so larger text and simple CTAs are valuable? And then, a website audit will reveal if the site is hitting those marks.
“A website audit uncovers a lot about the performance of a website in regard to SEO,” Ricardo continued. “We can see how long it takes pages or content to load, is it mobile friendly, are there any errors or missing links — all of which are critical to user experience. And based on the company’s ideal conversion, an audit shows us the level of effort that conversion requires. Sites like Amazon have made purchasing as simple as two clicks, by offering a ‘Buy Now’ option and saving personal information that auto populates in check out. If there are multiple steps to accomplish the end goal, you’re likely going to lose visitors, which will also impact your SEO.”
Tips for Optimizing Your SEO Success
1. Keep Your Content Human
SEO in the past used to be all about the keywords. Writers would try to jam as many relevant keywords into a landing page as they could because it made their page more relevant in search. But times have changed. While the keyword density has to be there, the user experience has to be the priority. Google’s ranking criteria now focuses much more heavily on the usefulness, quality, and human nature of the content, so make sure you’re delivering on all fronts.
2. Focus on Site Performance
We can’t say it enough: user experience is everything! And what doesn’t deliver a positive user experience is slow load times, broken links, and poor navigation. Google is looking at all these elements as key components that make your site visitors happy and keep them on your site for longer. If an error message is driving high bounce rates, your ranking will suffer. If you want to attract quality leads and keep them coming back, make sure you’re investing in UX, both your customers and Google will thank you.
3. Make Your Site Accessible
Making your website more accessible to more people is a great way to boost your SEO ranking and reach more people. Features such as dark mode, alt text, color contrast, caption video, etc. are all important elements to improving experiences for a wide range of demographics, including those with visual impairments and hearing loss — which include ⅓ of people over 65 years old. Keep CTAs large and visible, while focusing on spacing between buttons and text. And consider how people using mobile devices will need to navigate on a smaller screen.
4. Keep Security a Priority
Having an SSL (secure sockets layer) so that your data is encrypted is no longer just a good idea. A UTTP certification used to just be a recommendation; now it’s a requirement. And Google won’t crawl websites without one. This ensures users who create accounts or make purchases on a site can feel comfortable knowing their data and information is safe. Once again, user experience reigns supreme.
5. Remember it’s Not Once & Done
With SEO, the work is never really over. Google and other top search engines will change their ranking criteria as often as every six months. So while the impact of SEO is long term, the effort is on-going. Once you find the right recipe for your website, make sure you continue to revisit it regularly to make sure it remains effective.
The Future of SEO & What to Keep in Mind
With great power comes great responsibility. And that rings true with increasing capabilities of Generative AI. With so many new tools emerging (like ChatGPT and MidJourney) that can generate multiple blogs, images, and videos almost instantly, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the hype. But the truth is, search engines simply won’t applaud lack of effort.
In order to rank highly in SEO, you have to have quality, original content that only a human touch can provide. While these tools may save you time by facilitating new ideas and a great starting point, they can also get you in trouble for lacking authenticity and personality. Google rewards the brands that take the time and effort to personalize their content because that’s what drives better user experiences. Plus, other businesses using the same keywords are likely to get very similar content from their robot companions, which is a major SEO red flag.
Keep putting in the effort, and the SEO rewards will certainly be worth it.
How Assemble Can Help
The experts at Assemble can help provide the guidance you need to ensure your site is performing its best in the eyes of leading search engines. We can conduct a website audit and provide detailed recommendations as to how to improve your content and design to elevate your customer experience and increase your visibility in all the areas they are. To learn more, contact Assemble today.