Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The fact that you are reading this online and not in the form of a letter delivered to you proves why digital marketing is thriving in today’s world. Nowadays, building a solid online presence for your company is as important as running the company itself. The online availability of information and content makes it difficult for companies, especially startups, to stay in the game. The beauty of online marketing is the unpredictability and uncertainty of what becomes a trend and what does not.
But if you are like me and prefer a foolproof plan to ensure 90% of your content stays ahead in the game, then you are at the right place. Reading this will teach you the details of the wonder child of digital marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization is optimizing a website by creating content infused with rich keywords that helps the website become more relevant, popular and easily discoverable to online user searches. Search engines rank the website based on SEO, resulting in websites gaining traffic and engagement to their pages.
SEO content is any content intelligently created to attract organic traffic, visibility and audience engagement. To make content rank better in search results, writers put a lot of effort into creating SEO content by researching keywords, organizing their content and being consistent with their creatively informative blogs and articles.
Types of SEO content
An age-old technique for building a solid digital presence and attracting customers is to write and publish blogs on different domains of your business. Using many SEO keywords and phrases is why many companies opt for blogging as digital marketing.
A list is exactly what it sounds like! It’s a list, even if it’s heavy in SEO content. Indexes are trending because they are concise and don’t beat around the bush while explaining concepts. Lists clearly describe the problem and solution.
Example: 7 Reasons Why SEO Matters for Every Startup
The purpose of using articles for SEO content is similar to blogs — to create a solid digital presence. But, articles are traditionally considered objective while blogs are subjective around the subject matter and filled with personal opinions. Articles are typically longer and cover more information compared to blogs.
How-to guides for SEO Content are the most organic traffic-generating ways to build a digital presence. The ease of content explanation in these guides results in high audience engagement.
Videos are not a new concept to us in the 21st Century. But, optimized video bytes are a new concept. With the help of SEO, you can now optimize your video content to particularly answer specific questions by tagging that question to the video’s timestamp. You see this a lot with tutorial videos on YouTube.
In SEO Content, infographics are a blessing to the world. Everyone thrives on content but has minimal patience and concentration to sit and read an entire blog about the subject. Infographics help teach the concept in one glance. These visuals are easily shared and can go trend quickly via social media.
Starting a business can be overwhelming considering the extensive workload, strategies, and implementations that fall on one person. One of the necessary factors for business is to build a robust digital presence with the help of SEO. This optimization will have an extensive impact on one’s business.
Related: 3 Steps to Protecting Your Website’s Search Rankings
5 Reasons Why SEO Content Matters for Every Startup
1. SEO improves the user experience
User Experience (UX) is an essential element in digital marketing. Your website’s UX can make or break your brand. It is necessary to improve the UX for better engagement and to keep customer trust. Creating SEO Content improves your brand visibility and ranking in search engine results and user experience. Optimizing your content for SEO involves keyword research and image optimization.
Improved user experience also means creating a simple, easy-to-navigate and user-friendly website that follows Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (electronic and information technology should be accessible to people with disabilities). For a good user experience, you want to ensure that your content page loads quickly, your website works on different devices and that you use relevant keywords to create SEO content.
2. SEO increases organic traffic
Optimizing your content with keywords and long-tail phrases relevant to user searches increases the chances your website will be visible. It also helps to secure a higher rank in the search engine page results, thereby increasing the organic traffic generated to your website.
Furthermore, an increase in organic traffic increases your conversion ratios, eventually leading to a rise in revenue. Traffic generation, conversion rates and income are all interrelated to how well the content performs on the search engine results page.
3. SEO helps collect customer behavior data
Startups are new bees trying to build a niche by stepping into the corporate world. The target audience is unidentified in the beginning and customer retention is at a slower pace. Thus, having a source for extracting customer data and analyzing customer behavior is essential for startups. SEO content can act as that crucial source. SEO tools help identify which keywords or phrases the audience uses while searching for a particular topic. Startups can use this information to collect customer data, analyze their behavior and create SEO content to reach their target audience.
4. SEO creates a brand image
A good SEO strategy ensures a higher ranking on the search engine results page and increases the organic traffic generated. The webpage that appears higher in a search to an audience is considered reliable and informative. The more an audience sees your content, the more they find it reliable and trustworthy, thereby improving your brand value and image.
5. SEO gives higher ranking
It is no surprise that SEO can easily change your website’s rank. Using relevant keywords and long-tail phrases works well in increasing the visibility of your website. But to find relevant keywords, conduct extensive research on the subject matter and user search queries.
Besides keywords, things like page optimization and speed will extensively impact your ranking. Thus, to rank better and higher, one must consider SEO as the Holy Bible of digital marketing.
Related: Could SEO Permanently Ruin Your Website?
Conclusion
From a business point of view, startups create something different and fresh. But a startup’s exposure and market space are in danger due to competitors, large multinational companies and renowned small and big enterprises. To battle against this competition and improve exposure, using SEO tools and techniques will give you the stage to reach your target audience and stay ahead of your competitors.
