What Is SEO in Digital Marketing? 

SEO is a key ingredient of digital marketing. SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimisation, is the process by which a website aims to generate more organic traffic and visibility. This is achieved through a variety of techniques, from keyword research to link building. 

Keep reading to find out more about the importance of SEO in digital marketing, and discover why it benefits many businesses today. 

What is SEO? 

First things first – what is SEO and how does it work? 

SEO is the process of generating organic, free traffic to a website online. Primarily, on search engines such as Google. The main objective of SEO is to rank website positions well on these search engines. In turn, this results in more visibility for the company in question, and hopefully, more website visits and potential engagement with their services and/or products. 

SEO is not an activity that can be done quickly. While it can be self-taught, many companies tend to either have their own in-house SEO specialist teams or outsource this through SEO and marketing agencies and searching things online like “SEO agency London.’ While SEO may not be a familiar marketing term for everyone, it is certainly a core part of digital marketing and has been for many years. 

How does SEO work?

SEO is not a quick task. It can take several months for efforts to come to fruition. Once SEO activities have been performed, such pages will need to be both crawled and indexed by search engines. 

There are many ways SEO and digital marketing specialists perform SEO activities. For instance, keyword research – which, in simple terms, means finding popular keywords that rank well on Google, and then using these in the website’s content, URLs, headings, image alt-texts and much more. Another way SEO is achieved is through good inbound links. For instance, a company may provide a backlink for another high-authority website, which in turn drives visibility and establishes a website. Nevertheless, the main goal of SEO is to drive visibility and rankings for websites.

Visibility refers to how well a website performs on search engines. For example, a website that ranks well for many search queries will likely have more visibility. Meanwhile, rankings refer to how well specific web pages rank on search engines. The higher the position, the better. But, these rankings can change with time, competition and other external factors such as search engine algorithm updates. 

How important is SEO for digital marketing? 

SEO is an extremely important element of digital marketing. In today’s digital world, the primary way companies generate leads and sales is through online visibility. Though this is achieved through social media campaigns, SEO is also another major part of digital marketing efforts. 

But, why? Well, the majority of people nowadays use search engines, such as Google, to search for solutions to their problems. For example, someone looking to buy “the best gym leggings” will first see the companies that rank well for this term! And, consequently, customers naturally tend to only consider the top-performing pages that appear. Evidently, meaning SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing.