How SEO Marketing can help your business grow

Friday, 11 November 2022

SEO Marketing is a service that a lot of businesses in Ireland are not completely familiar with. A short explanation could be that this is a highly technical marketing domain, with its own jargon, where even the abbreviation SEO - Search Engine Optimisation - doesn’t give much away to the uninitiated. Few business owners and managers are fully aware of SEO Marketing as a service, but most are probably familiar with the main outputs of it: Google ranking, keywords, content, organic traffic, etc. Our role as a digital marketing agency in Dublin is to help SMEs in Ireland understand the role and the potential for business growth that SEO Marketing has.

So, you run a business and you realise that people searching for a product or service you offer could not find you on the first result pages on search engines like Google, or even worse, you do not exist over the internet for them. Now you are concerned and don't know how to boost your business online, generate more leads and sales, and establish a brand name. Well, you are in the right place. We will guide you through the essential components of a successful SEO Marketing and provide the best tips and tricks to boost your business. Let’s get started.

What is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)?

According to Google, SEO is the process where you optimise your website so that search engines can locate it and hence achieve your goal of online visibility or increased conversions (although the specific goals might vary for organisations). Now, most search engines have their “secret recipe” to rank pages; for Google, it's RankBrain. This isn’t a very transparent framework and the purpose of that is to keep the competition fair on the web.

But, as usual, after much research and plenty of trial and error, there is a breakthrough that helps developers and SEO experts peek at how the algorithm works and come up with a few known tricks to rank better. If you come from an engineering background or know how algorithms work, who knows, you may be able to find a loophole that you can exploit. Otherwise, you could definitely use the help of marketing experts in SEO Services.

What is SEM (Search Engine Marketing)?

Millions of users and businesses use the search engines like Google to solve their problems by typing in queries. Now, these queries can be B2B (Business to Business) or B2C (Business to Customer) targeted audience, and this should not be neglected as a business opportunity for the following reasons:

- Google Chrome dominates 65.52% of browser share worldwide from Aug 2021 - Aug 2022 (GlobalStats)

- Google dominates a whopping 92% share when comes to the Search engine Market worldwide (GlobalStats)

- As of August 2022, 59.4% of all web traffic came through mobile phones (Oberlo)

Based on the above evidence, we can confirm that SEO Marketing has a huge potential to convert available audiences to possible future customers. What elements of SEO can affect my marketing? What online strategy should I choose for my business? These are some of the possible questions that may arise after avid reading. Let’s find out.

SEO Marketing Components (On-Page, Off-Page)

On-Page SEO Marketing

Moz defines On-Page search engine optimisation as marketing elements that are in control and can be optimised to rank higher in search engine results and drive more relevant traffic. This includes content, keywords and HTML dynamics of the page, also known as source code. In simple terms, On-Page SEO Marketing has to deal with the page appearance and check if the content is related to the user queries.

Content

The type of information you deliver to the audience is of high priority. Content that answers user questions with clear and specific information. The flow of information to the user can be in different formats; for example, it can be an image of the format PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, and PSD; or a video of the format MP4, MOV, WMV, and FLV; or a simple text.

Moreover, content should have three major goals. Although most pages suggest E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritative and Trustworthiness), Google prefers high-quality, meaningful content compared to junk information that is meaningless. Two major benefits of quality content are that you rank higher and keep the user happy, and who knows, the user might just end up exploring more pages on your website, improving the conversion rate.

And talking about the targeted audience, let’s say Taylor Swift (an American singer) is coming to Dublin, and you want to book tickets, you go to Google and type in “Swift” and see a picture of a Suzuki Swift. Hence you reframe your sentence, and this time you get the expected result. Such a phenomenon happens with lots of users out there and drives in the wrong traffic, users being less interested in the content they are presented with. This is where the concept of negative keywords comes into play.

Lastly, fresh and recent content has more importance than old and obsolete content. Therefore, always try to update your users about what is latest in the field of your expertise and his interest.

Keywords

The use of appropriate keywords will lead to more quality traffic and help marketing. After all, most marketing SEO efforts are to discover a search engine's full potential, and organisations should try to figure out/ guess popular keywords when users start their search journey for a product or service. But most of the time, using popular keywords
may affect SEO ranking as the factor of Keyword Difficulty walks in.

Keyword difficulty means if the keyword is challenging it will take you a lot of effort to publish your content on the first search result of google and time to see results. If most companies are already using a keyword - particularly well-established organisations with a high domain rating - it can be challenging to break through into the top search results. For instance, a well-established leading broker like Coverinaclick.ie can pursue a keyword with high difficulty like car insurance in Ireland, whereas a new player in the market would have to settle for a lower volume, lower difficulty keyword. When the landscape is crowded, it can be a good idea to evaluate related keywords with less competition.

HTML

Your page’s quality also depends on the way it is written. Specific HTML components can be optimised to help a website or page rank better in search results, making it an important component of SEO Marketing. based on this, search engines can tell a page's quality based on how it is tagged, described, and labelled. Maintaining HTML elements can significantly improve digital marketing efforts.

Below are important factors of SEO Marketing for HTML:

Title Tag

Is displayed in search results, and the user's browser tab acts as a description of a page. The target term should be included in the title tag together with a catchy phrase for the user to click on the link in the search results.

Meta Description

Is displayed in search results below the title tag and gives a general idea of the website in question. This description, which is typically limited to 160 characters, can provide
additional information that persuades a user to click through to the content.

URL

This differentiates a webpage from all other pages is its online address and is unique for every page. The goal keyword and the site hierarchy should both be present in the URL for it to rank highly in search results. Rankings in search engines may suffer if this information is not made apparent in the URL.

Alt Text

Alt text is the description of a picture that was used to provide information to those with visual impairments. To help with SEO Marketing, alt text for images can also have targeted keywords.

Headings

Headings help in separating and presenting content pieces into distinct sections. In HTML, there are six types of headers, with "H1" being the largest title and “H6” being the smallest. Content can be made more appealing by breaking it up into manageable chunks and giving each one a relevant heading.

Loading Speed, Mobile Friendly and Secured

Pages that load faster get more importance than slower pages, as users may not wait less than 3 seconds and move to another page. The maximum scope for SEO Marketing is having mobile-friendly or responsive websites, since most of the mobile device users have the most conversions, you should also take into consideration the mobile aspects of the website. Finally, you must have an HTTPS mark and SSL certificate for the website to be considered secured from unsafe traffic, as Google respects secured websites and ranks them higher.

Off-Page SEO Marketing

Semrush defines Off-Page SEO Marketing as optimising the aspects that don’t have anything to do with the technical concepts. These are more focused on building the brand, content marketing, podcasts, forums, and link building.

Links

Typically, there are two types of links: External and Internal. Links that share a website’s content with other websites are called external links, whereas links that travel from one page to another within the website are referred to as internal links. But the quality factor of the page matters the most. Reliable websites with good content provide the best links. Therefore, it is advisable to have a backlink from a reliable website to increase authority.

Another aspect would be the number of links to the website: the higher the number of quality links the better your website’s authority will be and the more chances of conversions.

Domain Authority, Page Authority and Bounce Rate

Domain Authority instructs and aims to predict how a whole website will perform in search engine rankings. Backlinks, top-level domains, and several other characteristics are analysed in order to determine domain authority. High-domain authority websites typically fare better in search results.

Page Authority is similar to Domain Authority and can also be considered a subset. Page Authority tries to forecast where a page will appear in search engine results.

Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors to a website that only stay on one page before leaving, known as the bounce rate. This should be as low as possible, as websites with a high bounce rate are less authoritative and, thus, lose out on certain SEO Marketing benefits.

Demographics

Probably one of the most important aspects of SEO Marketing. With rising mobile users, a business's geographical data are seriously considered by search engines. Companies develop unique marketing SEO tactics, including any necessary translation, for each region in which they conduct business. International businesses can use this SEO technique to use a targeted marketing strategy across several nations and search results, drawing potential clients worldwide.

Check what SEO Marketing can do for your business

Ask for a Free Consultation now and find out how SEO Marketing can help your business grow online. EverBold Marketing is a Dublin-based SEO Services Agency boosting Google rankings for some of Ireland’s leading companies and fast-growing start-ups.

Read our related article if you wish to learn more about how to improve SEO for your small business.