The Complete Guide to Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing

The Complete Guide to Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing

Search Engine Optimization is an important aspect of digital marketing. It’s an inexpensive way of getting industry’s specific traffic to your website.

Even though SEO is a popular term on the internet space, there are still a lot of misconceptions around it. In this article, I will share all you need to know about search engine optimization and social media marketing. You may think SEO is just a three letter word. But it can make a lot of difference in your digital marketing strategy.

What’s Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (commonly written as SEO) is the process of making strategic changes to your content and website design to make it visible to search engines. When SEO is correctly implemented on your website, its visibility will increase through organic and unpaid search results.

Here’s how SEO Works. When you host your website and start posting content on it. Search engines like Google will scan your website, analyze its design and content elements.

From such analysis, Google can tell the type of topic your website discusses and the user-friendliness of the website. This process that enables search engines to deliver relevant and useful search results to users is known as crawling.

Again, SEO strategy is not a one-off strategy. It’s a continuous process that requires you to always make your website pages and content visible to search engines.

Even if your website is already ranking on Google, some SEO bad Practices you unknowingly implement on your website may affect the ranking.

Components of Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) doesn’t work in isolation. Several components or moving parts work together to deliver great results in any SEO strategy. Here are some of the components of SEO;

#1. Your Audience and Industry

Before you start any SEO strategy, it’s important to understand your audience and the industry in which you operate.

Preferably, carry out an extensive research to understand the type of content your audience likes reading, the trends in your industry, the market leaders (top competitors) and how they carry out their business, and the type of SEO strategy your competitors are implementing.

This information will give you an idea of the best SEO strategy that will work better in your niche.

#2. Keyword Research

Once you understand your audience and the industry in which you operate, the next step is to carry out keyword research.

Keyword research is one of the main components of SEO. It involves searching for popular words and phrases people are searching for on search engines.

The essence of keyword research is to figure out what your audience’s needs and tailor your articles towards meeting those needs.

Keyword research is a sensitive aspect of your SEO strategy. How you handle it could make or mar your SEO strategy.

Your goal when carrying out keyword research is not only to pinpoint what your audience are searching for. But also how they search for it.

If you are new to keywords research activities, here are some of the best keywords research tools to kickstart your SEO

#3. Searcher’s Intent

Searcher’s intent refers to the goal a search engine user has in mind while searching for something. This is an important aspect of every SEO strategy..

It’s not all about writing content about a particular keyword. But writing it in a way and style that will be appealing to your audience.

For instance, if you search for the keywords “movies about the boat in a storm” on any search engine, it will immediately understand that you are looking for any of the following movies; Adrift, Life of Pi, etc.

Google or any other website won’t popup pages optimized for the keywords “movies about the boat in a storm”. Instead, they come up with results based on the searcher’s intent.

You see, search engines are very smart, and you have to think like them to perform outstandingly in the search result page.

#4. Analytics and Reporting

It’s not all about implementing your SEO strategy. It’s important to evaluate your website’s performance periodically and see if the strategy is achieving its goal. And you can only get accurate information for such evaluation through analytics and reporting.

In case you don’t know, accurate reporting is as important as your SEO campaigns itself.

According to experts' opinion, some SEO strategies fail due to lack of accurate results on campaign’s achievement. Without accurate results, there’s no way you can measure performance.

#5. Meta Tags

Meta tags are another important component of Search Engine Optimization. As a rule, it’s important to have a meta tag for every page of your website. It gives signals to search engines about the relevance of a particular keyword to the searcher’s intent.

Similarly, ensure you have a meta description for every article you publish on your website. Meta descriptions give searchers an overview of your article content on search engine result page.

It’s always advisable to write convincing and curiosity inspiring meta descriptions, because it goes a long way to determine your click through rate.

#6. Content

Content is the backbone of every SEO strategy. If you consistently create high quality and thought-provoking content on your website, you will not only rank high on search engine result page (serp). But also create positive users’ experience for your users.