Search engine optimization (SEO) marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of getting your target customers to your website through organic search engine results.
Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO is an excellent place to help you get started with SEO, amplify your campaigns in other channels and attract relevant traffic to your website.
SEO is all about inbound marketing (not paid) that brings customers to your website. Start with a strong content strategy. The more high-quality content you produce and the more natural links you can generate to your website, the higher your site will rank.
What do I use SEO for?
While everyone approaches SEO differently depending on their content strategy, two core strategies can start you SEO-ing like a pro.
Keyword strategy
What are your customers searching for to find products in your industry? Use Google Keyword Planner from AdWords to search terms that describe products in your category.
There are single-word keywords, and “long-tail” keywords, which are strings of terms that are specific to your product.
Look for terms that have a high search volume each month. Determine the difficulty for ranking high on each term using Open Site Explorer.
Intelligently design and plan your content around the highest ranking terms you’ve chosen. Include those keywords (single-word or long-tail) on your landing page titles, homepage, blog posts and so on.
Content and links strategy
Generating strong, relevant content and links to your website are essential to SEO.
Leveraging publicity from publications, product pages like Product Hunt and your content marketing efforts will create valuable links to your website. This will boost the rank of your website.
Pros:
- A great SEO strategy can attract thousands of inbound traffic leads per month
- The more you qualify your target keywords, the more high-quality leads you will have visit your website
Cons:
- While hiring a freelancer or SEO agency to create articles that target keywords is a valid strategy, your ranking will be affected if the writer jams in links and keywords that generate short-term traffic but violate search-engine guidelines
Tools
Resources
- Moz guide: The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building
- Google: Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
- Moz blog: SEO The Illustrated SEO Competitive Analysis Workflow