Search engine optimisation forms an important part of your digital marketing strategy. Here we explain how SEO interacts with the rest of your marketing, including your website itself and any paid advertising you drive to it.

What is Marketing?

Marketing is the process of creating and delivering value to your target market to make them aware of the product or service you are selling. There are many ways to market your products or services, such as social media, blog posts, print, and video marketing. Marketers focus on delivering these activities to meet the needs of a target market in the hopes of resonating with them.

The main purpose of marketing is to increase your brand awareness, sales, and profits. When marketing is done correctly, this can have a significant impact on reaching your business goals and it can also increase brand awareness and maximise brand recognition.

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is when you continually amend your website and overall online presence to improve the quality and quantity of traffic to your website from search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. SEO activities include improving your keywords, content, links, metadata, images, and more in order to increase traffic to your website from organic sources.

Carrying out these tasks regularly can increase your rankings on search engines, helping people find your business faster online.

Google bots will scan every page of your website and rank it against all the other pages that the bots have scanned. You could then appear on the first page of search results rather than on later pages that many people won’t see.

There are three pillars to SEO: architecture, content and links. Architecture is the structure and build of your website, while content is the text, images, videos and more, and links refers to the internal links within your website as well as the external backlinks to your site.

How SEO and digital marketing work together

You need to be creative when marketing to create eye-catching social media posts, content and emails to attract attention to your products. SEO is often technical-based work, for example website architecture and keyword research, whereas other marketing such as social media is often creative-based work.

SEO focuses on the flow of traffic to your website, but marketing is all about promoting and selling your product. The main aim of SEO is to get people to your website, whereas marketing as an overall discipline is the art of convincing people to buy your products once they land on your website. Marketing will push people to your website, and your website will drive people to make a purchase. SEO without marketing and marketing without SEO is like a phone without a phone line; they work together massively.

In fact, SEO and marketing aren’t at all mutually exclusive, and SEO itself is a form of marketing. This is particularly true when thinking about writing content – content requires creativity and calls to action and is therefore a form of marketing, but it also requires keyword research and optimisation.

Website architecture: The foundations of successful marketing

You will need a high-quality website before you start any marketing; if you have a low-quality website, even if your products are unique, it will discourage people from purchasing from you. There is little point in spending money on paid advertising only for users to land on a poor website and ultimately not convert. However, once your website is up to scratch, then you will be able to push your products through social media, paid search or email marketing. SEO can greatly help with building a successful website from scratch. Every website should be designed and built with SEO in mind to lay the foundations for success and ensure there aren’t big issues to contend with later. This can include considering the server the website is built on, what it is built with, the architecture or structure of the website, and how this structure is reflected in the layout, navigation, breadcrumbs and sitemap. Using the core principles of SEO to build a website allows all your subsequent marketing to fall into place and gives you a solid structure upon which to lay out your content.

Attracting both organic and paid traffic

A core activity for SEO is performing keyword research to find out what people are search for and optimise your website for those keywords. Without SEO keyword research, you won’t be able to optimise your content so well, meaning you may rank lower in search results and therefore customers may not find you – even if you have made an effort to create new content. It may be that you have created new pages for a marketing campaign and would like these to also gain traction with organic traffic, but this is unlikely to happen if the pages are not optimised.

Paid advertising and SEO can work well together because sometimes if you carry out an activity for one of these, you can use it as a starting point for the other. For example, you could carry out keyword research for PPC and then use the same list to start your SEO keyword research, and vice versa. Or, you may need to create a landing page for a PPC campaign and you could optimise this to also try to gain organic traffic.

Overall, SEO and marketing are both as important as each other. Not to worry, we specialise in both! This takes the stress away, leaving you to focus on the more essential things. Get in touch with us today to find out how we can improve your marketing and SEO.

If you need help with any of our services, get in touch with us today. 

Need assistance creating a winning marketing strategy and plan? Why not sign up for our ‘Marketing Plan In A Day’ workshop on October 26th. Find out more or book your place here.