What is SEO in Marketing? What You Should Know

So, your forte is marketing, but this whole SEO thing is branching into every aspect of business there is, and now you find yourself facing SEO demands from the higher-ups, and quite honestly, you have no idea where to start… Sound familiar?

You know what a search engine is, right?

Okay, so your company has a website, someone in the web design department put it together, and while the design looks great, it’s just pictures.

Now, your copywriter created text to go on that website to advertise your company and your product – you can’t have a company website with just pictures, can you?

In order for people to be able to find your website, we need to tell search engines to list it in search results.

For example, if you sell socks, you want search engines to show your website link when they search for socks.

Part of SEO or “Search Engine Optimization” is telling a search engine the basics – what your website is and what you sell. This way, the search engine knows that when people search for “Socks” your website is relevant.

Another part of SEO is to continue to refine and better the search engine optimization of your site so that you earn better placement in search engine results. This is done in a number of ways, some of which include:

So, SEO is all about creating a blueprint of your website that search engines can read quickly and use to rank your website. The better job you do at SEO, the better your search engine presence will be.

Now, how does this apply to marketing specifically?

Let’s go back to the shoe business.

As a marketer, your job is to monitor trends, know your audience, and create advertising campaigns that appeal to that demographic.

SEO can provide a lot of information that you need to do your job!

For example, with a search engine analytics program monitoring the data for your site, you can not only see who is searching for socks, but you can see the area they live in, their age, their sex, and what specific keywords they have used to search for your business.

Now the more you work to optimize your website for search engines, the better exposure you will receive and that means more traffic to your website and more followers on social networks. This creates more data that you can use to create a profile of your audience. The more accurate your profile, the more accurately you can target marketing campaigns.

Targeting your campaigns to create marketing material isn’t the only way that SEO can help your job as a marketer though. You can also take the information to garner and use it to purchase keywords and advertisement spots to ensure that your marketing budget is only being spent on relevant traffic using keywords that are searched often. The last thing you want to do is to spend money on a particular keyword only to find out that it gets an average of two searches every month! You need to buy keywords that you know are getting traffic and that you know people will associate with your product and brand.

SEO and marketing go hand in hand. In order for you to create the best performing marketing campaigns and materials, you need to perfect your SEO strategy and gather the market data that you obtain as a result. The more work you put into your SEO campaign, the more valuable marketing research data you can harvest and the better return on your marketing investment you will see!