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Digital Marketing
Unit – 2
Search Engine Optimization:- SEO is “the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web
page in a search engine's unpaid results”

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In simple terms, SEO means the process of improving
your website to increase its visibility in Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines whenever
people search for:

 Products you sell.

 Services yoru provide.
 Information on topics in which you have deep expertise and/or experience.

The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to be found and clicked
on. Ultimately, the goal of search engine optimization is to help attract website visitors who will
become customers, clients or an audience that keeps coming back.

SEM and PPC are two other common terms you will read about a lot here on Search Engine Land and
hear about in the larger search marketing community.

SEM stands for search engine marketing

Put simply, search marketing is the process of gaining traffic and visibility from search engines
through both paid and unpaid efforts.

So how do SEO and SEM differ? Technically they aren’t different – SEO is simply one-half of SEM:

 SEO = driving organic traffic from search engines.

 SEM = driving organic and paid traffic from search engines.

Now, this is where things get a bit confusing.

Imagine SEM is a coin. SEO is one side of that coin. PPC is on the flip side.

PPC stands for pay-per-click – a type of digital marketing where advertisers are charged whenever
one of their ads gets clicked on.

Basically, advertisers bid on specific keywords or phrases that they want their ads to appear for in the
search engine results. When a user searches for one of those keywords or phrases, the advertiser’s
ad will appear among the top results.

So again, if we think of search marketing as a coin, SEO and PPC are two sides of the same coin – SEO
is the unpaid side, PPC is the paid side.

Why is SEO important?

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Whenever people want to go somewhere, do something, find information, research or

buy a product/service – their journey typically begins with a search.

But today, search is incredibly fragmented. Users may search on traditional web search engines (e.g.,
Google, Microsoft Bing), social platforms (e.g., YouTube, TikTok) or retailer websites (e.g., Amazon).

SEO is the foundation of holistic marketing, where everything your company does matters. Once you
understand what your users want, you can then implement that knowledge across your:

 Campaigns (paid and organic).

 Website content.
 Social media properties.

SEO is a channel that drives the traffic you need to achieve key business goals (e.g., conversions,
visits, sales). It also builds trust – a website that ranks well is generally regarded as authoritative or
trustworthy, which are key elements Google wants to reward with better rankings.

Types of SEO
There are three types of SEO:

 Technical SEO: Optimizing the technical aspects of a website.

 On-site SEO: Optimizing the content on a website for users and search engines.
 Off-site SEO: Creating brand assets (e.g., people, marks, values, vision, slogans, catchphrases,
colors) and doing things that will ultimately enhance brand awareness and recognition (i.e.,
demonstrating and growing its expertise, authority and trustworthiness) and demand
generation.

How does SEO work?

If you found this page via Google search, you likely searched Google for [what is seo].

As a whole, SEO really works through a combination of:

 People: The person or team responsible for doing or ensuring that the strategic, tactical and
operational SEO work is completed.
 Processes: The actions taken to make the work more efficient.
 Technology: The platforms and tools used.
 Activities: The end product, or output.

Many other things factor into how SEO works. What follows is a high-level look at the most
important knowledge and process elements.

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How do you, for your site or your company’s site, “optimize” for search engines? How do you know
how much time to spend on SEO? How can you differentiate “good” SEO advice from “bad” or
harmful SEO advice?

What’s likely interesting to you as a business owner or employee is how you can actually leverage
SEO to help drive more relevant traffic, leads, sales, and ultimately revenue and profit for your
business.

Why Should You Care About SEO:- Lots and lots of people search for things. That traffic can be
extremely powerful for a business not only because there is a lot of traffic, but because there is a lot
of very specific, high-intent traffic.

If you sell blue widgets, would you rather buy a billboard so anyone with a car in your area sees your
ad (whether they will ever have any interest in blue widgets or not), or show up every time anyone in
the world types “buy blue widgets” into a search engine? Probably the latter, because those people
have commercial intent, meaning they are standing up and saying that they want to buy something
you offer. People are searching for any manner of things directly related to your business. Beyond
that, your prospects are also searching for all kinds of things that are only loosely related to your
business. These represent even more opportunities to connect with those folks and help answer their
questions, solve their problems, and become a trusted resource for them.

What Actually Works for Driving Traffic from Search Engines:- First it’s important to note that
Google is responsible for most of the search engine traffic in the world (though there is always some
flux in the actual numbers). This may vary from niche to niche, but it’s likely that Google is the
dominant player in the search results that your business or website would want to show up in, and
the best practices outlined will help position your site and its content to rank in other search engines,
as well.

Regardless of what search engine you use, search results are constantly changing. Google particularly
has updated lots of things surrounding how they rank websites by way of lots of different names
recently, and a lot of the easiest and cheapest ways to get your pages to rank in search results have
become extremely risky in recent years.

 Google is looking for pages that contain high-quality, relevant information about the
searcher’s query.
 They determine relevance by “crawling” (or reading) your website’s content and evaluating
(algorithmically) whether that content is relevant to what the searcher is looking for, mostly
based on the keywords it contains.
 They determine “quality” by a number of means, but prominent among those is still the
number and quality of other websites that link to your page and your site as a whole. To put it
extremely simply: If the only sites that link to your blue widget site are blogs that no one else
on the Web has linked to, and my blue widget site gets links from trusted places that are
linked to frequently, like CNN.com, my site will be more trusted (and assumed to be higher
quality) than yours.

Increasingly, additional elements are being weighed by Google’s algorithm to determine where your
site will rank, such as:-
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 How people engage with your site (Do they find the information they need and stay on your
site, or bounce back to the search page and click on another link? Or do they just ignore your
listing in search results altogether and never click-through?)
 Your site’s loading speed and “mobile friendliness”
 How much unique content you have (versus very “thin” low-value content or duplicate
content)

There are hundreds of ranking factors Google’s algorithm considers in response to searches, and they
are constantly updating and refining their process. The good news is, you don’t have to be a search
engine scholar to rank for valuable terms in search results. We’ll walk through proven, repeatable
best practices for optimizing websites for search that can help you drive targeted traffic through
search without having to reverse-engineer the core competency of one of the world’s most valuable
companies.

Keyword Research & Keyword Targeting Best Practices:- The first step in search engine optimization
is really to determine what it is you’re actually optimizing for. This means identifying the terms
people are searching for (also known as “keywords”) that you want your website to rank for in search
engines like Google. Unfortunately it’s not quite that simple. There are a few key factors to take into
account when determining the keywords you want to target on your site:-

 Search Volume – The first factor to consider is how many people (if any) are actually
searching for a given keyword. The more people there are searching for a keyword, the bigger
the audience you stand to reach. Conversely, if no one is searching for a keyword, there is no
audience available to find your content through search.
 Relevance – If a term is frequently searched for that’s great: but what if it’s not completely
relevant to your prospects? Relevance seems straight-forward at first: if you’re selling
enterprise email marketing automation software you don’t want to show up for searches that
don’t have anything to do with your business, like “pet supplies.” But what about terms like
“email marketing software”? This might intuitively seem like a great description of what you
do, but if you’re selling to Fortune 100 companies, most of the traffic for this very competitive
term will be searchers who don’t have any interest in buying your software (and the folks you
do want to reach might never buy your expensive, complex solution based on a simple Google
search). Conversely, you might think a tangential keyword like “best enterprise PPC marketing
solutions” is totally irrelevant to your business since you don’t sell PPC marketing software.
But if your prospect is a CMO or marketing director, getting in front of them with a helpful
resource on evaluating pay-per-click tools could be a great “first touch” and an excellent way
to start a relationship with a prospective buyer.
 Competition – As with any business opportunity, in SEO you want to consider the potential
costs and likelihood of success. For SEO, this means understanding the relative competition
(and likelihood to rank) for specific terms.

First you need to understand who your prospective customers are and what they’re likely to search
for. If you don’t already understand who your prospects are, thinking about that is a good place to
start, for your business in general but also for SEO. From there you want to understand:-

 What types of things are they interested in?

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 What problems do they have?

 What type of language do they use to describe the things that they do, the tools that they
use, etc.?
 Who else are they buying things from?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have an initial “seed list” of possible keywords and
domains to help you get additional keyword ideas and to put some search volume and competition
metrics around.

Take the list of core ways that your prospects and customers describe what you do, and start to input
those into keyword tools like Google’s own keyword tool or tools like Uber Suggest or WordStream’s
keyword tool. You can find a more comprehensive list of keyword tools, but the main idea is that in
this initial step, you’ll want to run a number of searches with a variety of different keyword tools.

Again: this doesn’t just have to be something you look at for competitors. You could look at related
tools that are selling to the same market for content ideas, and even look at the major niche
publishers who talk about your topic (and that your prospects are reading) and see what kinds of
keywords those sites are driving traffic for.

Additionally, if you have an existing site, you’re likely getting some traffic from search engines
already. If that’s the case, you can use some of your own keyword data to help you understand which
terms are driving traffic (and which you might be able to rank a bit better for).

Google also makes a bit more of this data available in their free Webmaster Tools interface (if you
haven’t set up an account, this is a very valuable SEO tool both for unearthing search query data and
for diagnosing various technical SEO issues – more on Webmaster Tools set up here). Once
Webmaster Tools is set up, you can navigate to this link when logged in and see the search queries
that are driving traffic to your site. These could be good terms to focus additional content promotion
and internal linking around (more on each of those topics later), and could also be great “seed
keywords” to help you get more great ideas about what to target.

Once you’ve taken the time to understand how your prospects talk and what they search for, have
looked at the keywords driving traffic to your competitors and related sites, and have looked at the
terms driving traffic to your own site, you need to work to understand which terms you can
conceivably rank for and where the best opportunities actually lie. Determining the relative
competition of a keyword can be a fairly complex task. At a very high level, you need to understand:-

 How trusted and authoritative (in other words: how many links does the whole site get, and
how high quality, trusted, and relevant are those linking sites?) other entire sites that will be
competing to rank for the same term are
 How well aligned they are with the keyword itself (do they offer a great answer to that
searcher’s question)
 How popular and authoritative each individual page in that search result is (in other words:
how many links does the page itself have, and how high quality, trusted, and relevant are
those linking sites?)