What is SEO Marketing? 9 Tips to Make It Work For Your Company

SEO marketing, short for Search Engine Optimization, is the process of improving your website’s visibility for major search engines like Google.

It is one of the oldest ways of digital marketing that spawned as a natural result of companies like Yahoo and Google.

As these search engines became the most popular way to search for information on the internet, certain methods started to emerge to help websites improve their rankings on these search engines and bring more traffic to their site.

Not only is it one of the oldest ways, but it is also one of the most profitable methods of digital marketing.

SEO marketing on average, returns an insane ROI of 2,200%!

In fact, there was a study done that asked 65 business owners from different industries which digital marketing method they thought was most effective and here are the results:

49% of them considered SEO to be the most effective marketing medium!

SEO is only second to email marketing, which has an average ROI of 3,600%.

But email marketing isn’t considered a traffic generation strategy, but rather a followup and customer relationship strategy, and you would need an additional all-in-one funnel software and good customer relationship management to effectively deliver your email content.

So we can safely say that the traffic generation ROI king is SEO marketing.

The Difference between Paid Ads vs SEO For Your Company

The difference between a PPC campaign and an SEO marketing campaign is that once you start to optimize your website for Google, and it starts to rank high on the search engines, the cost to maintain those rankings is relatively low compared to the cost of PPC.

With paid ads, if you stop paying for the ads, your traffic will automatically stop.

With organic Google traffic, even if you stopped working on off-page SEO for the website, such as acquiring backlinks, your traffic won’t completely die. In fact, over time the traffic might rise as a result of great SEO.

You set it up once and you can get a lot of traffic for a very long time, although some maintenance is required.

Why is SEO Marketing Important for Your company?

Aside from having a huge ROI for your company as you can see above, Search is not slowing down.

Many people think that because of the increase of social media traffic that SEO might slowly be dying, but the numbers show otherwise.

The stats show that every single year, more and more people are searching on search engines, especially Google.

In 2011, it was the first time Google had reached over 1 trillion (with a “t”) searches in one year.

Fast forward to today, and that number is well over 3 trillion! And it’s only going up every year.

So the trend clearly shows that search is not losing any traction.

Google is dominantly the most searched search engine and it’s the one most marketers aim to rank on, and the one I would suggest to rank for your company.

SEO Marketing Tips for Your Company

So, how can you actually use SEO marketing and make it work for your company?

It is said that Google has over 200 ranking factors.

In this post, I have divided those factors into two different categories:

1. On-page optimization
2. Off-page optimization

I’ll be going over some of the most important ranking factors so you can get an advantage for your business.

On-Page SEO Marketing Optimization

First is on-page SEO optimization. On-page optimization as the name suggests is making optimizations on the page you want to rank for, for a certain keyword.

On-page optimization is something that you have complete control of, so if possible, you should fully optimize your pages to make it SEO friendly.

I’ll be going over a few ways you can do for your company to improve its on-page SEO and help you to rank higher in Google.

On-page optimization is comprised of many elements, the most prominent being:

1. Relevant, Useful Content
2. Headings and Titles
3. Keyword Density & Related Terms
4. Images & Alt text
5. Meta Titles and Descriptions
6. Inner Linking
7. Outbound Links

Let’s go over a few of the more important factors, starting with the whole website.

Sitemap and Robots.txt

In order to have your website crawled by the Google search engine bot, you need to have a robots.txt setup so that it tells the search engine robots whether or not to crawl your page.

For most companies and businesses, I would suggest using WordPress as their CMS or Content Management System for short.

WordPress is a tried and true CMS and at the time of this writing, it’s the platform that is used by 43.1% of all websites!

There are many web hosting providers that allow you to install WordPress with just a few clicks, so it’s super easy to get started running your WordPress site.

Plus, WordPress allows you to install some amazing third party plugins to enhance your SEO marketing.

There are many All-in-One SEO plugins you can install, including many that are completely free.

With the click of a few buttons, you’ll have your robots.txt setup and also your Sitemap created by these all-in-one SEO plugins automatically.

1 – Relevant, Useful Content

They say content is king.

This saying still holds true and will remain to be true as long as there is information in the world.

When you have good content, you will naturally draw people to your site and people will even want to reference your content and it will start to gain trust with Google.

So the first tip with SEO marketing is to get good, relevant content that is useful for your readers.

You also want to make sure the word count is adequate for the industry that you’re in.

You can easily gauge the average post word count by searching for your target keyword in Google and looking at the top search results.

You can take the average of the top results and aim to write a post that has a similar word count.

Further Reading: What is SEO Content Writing? 27 Tips to Help You Adapt Your Writing Style to Better Rank

2 – Headings & Titles

You want to be able to organize your site with a good structure that’s good for both algorithms and also humans.

For most “human” readers, you wouldn’t normally read the entire post on a website. Most likely you’ll be skimming the site looking for relevant information that you are looking for.

If you are looking for a certain “backpack” for example, and you had a question about a certain part of the backpack, you would skim to that specific section.

For example:

If you wanted to see what laptop size the backpack can hold, you would want to go straight to that section of that post.

So you want to have the key component and structure of the post correct, with the keywords in the correct places so that both human readers and bots are satisfied.

Each section of the post can be categorized into the following::

• H1
• H2
• H3
• H4
• H5+

You would rarely go beyond H4 and H5.

You should ideally have your main target keyword in your H1, H2 and H3 titles throughout your site.

The H1 tag is your main title and you shouldn’t normally have more than 1 or 2, although some debate that you can have more.

H1 is the top tier title.

H2 is the second tier and the one you should use predominantly through your site structure.

H2 is telling Google (and humans) what the most important parts of the article are.

It’s even more important than paragraph texts, especially for certain keywords.

For example, let’s say you are targeting the keyword:

SEO Marketing

I’m actually targeting that exact keyword for this blog post you are reading, pretty meta isn’t it?

The H1 title could be:

• What is SEO Marketing?

Some of the H2 titles could be:

• On-Page SEO Marketing Strategies
• Off-Page SEO Marketing Strategies

Some of the H3 titles could be:

• Optimizing Content
• Optimizing Headlines and Titles

Another good use of H2 and H3’s could be in the form of questions and answers:

• The H1 would be the main topic
• H2’s could be the questions.
• Then the H3’s could be the answers.

That helps Google understand important keywords and topics and what the article is mostly about

For example:

H2 Title (Question)

• How do I start a blog?

H3 Titles (Answers):

• Step 1: Register a Domain Name
• Step 2: Get Web Hosting
• Step 3: Install WordPress

Hope you now have a good grasp on SEO titles and structures.

3 – Keyword Density & Related Terms

Keyword density is the % of the content that contains your keyword.

In the past, people started abusing this power and started “keyword stuffing” their articles for the keyword they wanted to rank for, but Google picked this up and updated their algorithm.

Nowadays, a good rule of thumb is to aim for around 1% – 2% (sometimes even less) of your keyword in the article.

For example, if you wanted to rank for the keyword “silicone spatula” and your article is 1,000 words in length, you would want to include the keyword about 10 times throughout the article.

The Google algorithm is now very sophisticated and uses machine learning (named RankBrain), so even if you include the keyword a few times, it can detect what keyword your article is optimized for.

4 – Images & Alt text

For both good user experience and good SEO, you want to put great, related images into your post whenever possible.

First of all, good images will provide for a better user experience, and second, Google loves to see images and media on a website.

I always include several images in my posts.

This post that you are reading right now contains relevant photos as well as screenshots wherever necessary.

Here’s a tip for images: Try to reduce their size so that it doesn’t take the website 20 seconds to load.

One best practice is to use “next generation” image formats, which in the case of images is a format called WebP.

WebP is supposedly much smaller than both PNG and JPGs while still maintaining the same quality.

You want to title your images and also give it an Alt Text.

The title of the image is the small little popup text when you hover over an image with your mouse.

The alt text is mostly for the search engine bots to understand what the image is about.

So they are both important for optimal SEO.

With WordPress this is really easy to do, you can go to the image and add the title of the image and the alt text.

You don’t have to include the alt text with every image anymore. As I mentioned before, Google is really good at detecting the relevant keyword on your site, but I would try to sprinkle it throughout your images.

5 – Meta Titles and Descriptions

Meta titles and descriptions is the text that shows up on the Google search results about the webpage.

If you search for “Neal Schaffer” on Google, you’ll get the following meta title and description:

A good rule of thumb is to include your targeted keyword into your meta title and meta description.

6 – Inner Linking

This is one of the most underrated ways to increase your SEO marketing without having to do any off-page SEO.

Inner linking is when you link from one part of your page to another part of your website.

And if you include your target keyword as your anchor text, it’ll give the search engines a better clue as to what the post you are pointing to is about.

An anchor text is a hyperlink with a word in it.

So instead of:

https://nealschaffer.com

It can be converted into a word:

Neal Schaffer

It clues the search engines about what the link is about or closely related to.

If you have these types of inner linking structures throughout your site, you’ll be able to pass the “link juice” to your other pages.

For example, normally most of the “link juice” goes to the homepage of a website.

But if the homepage doesn’t have any links going to any of your inner pages, that link juice is wasted and just stays on the homepage.

But if you have a good inner linking structure, you can spread the link juice around to your other posts and help strengthen those posts.

There’s a great WordPress plugin that helps with inner linking called Link Whisper. They have a free version for you to try.

7 – Outbound Links

Outbound links means linking to other relevant sites within your post.

It’s very unnatural if you don’t have any links on your site going to external sources.

So both to give credit and also to help your own SEO marketing, you should, whenever possible, be linking to other sites as either a source or for more contextual information.

Not only that, but it’ll also help the algorithm understand more of what your site is about by linking to other related sources and it’ll help you in your rankings as well.

Off-Page SEO Marketing Optimization

Now let’s talk about things that are not fully in our control, which is Off-Page SEO marketing strategies.

Off-Page means optimizing your SEO that is “off the page” or off your website as the name suggests.

In one word, off-page refers to backlinks.

Backlinks have been one of the hallmarks of SEO optimization and I would argue that it is still the most important factor when it comes to search engine optimization.

A big tip for off-page optimization:

You want to stay away from black-hat tactics such as buying links from “fake websites” or PBNs (private blog networks) in which people put up fake websites to point a link back to their so-called “money site.”

Google will tend to find out about these websites and they will be de-indexed. And if you have too many sites pointing to your site that are de-indexed, your own site could suffer from higher rankings.

8 – Anchor Text Profile

When you do get backlinks from other websites, sometimes they can be used in the form of anchor texts as mentioned above.

But other times, it’ll just be a link to the homepage with a general “branded” keyword like “Forbes” or “Forbes.com”

Anchor text percentages of the exact match keyword you are targeting used to be important in the past.

But nowadays the search algorithm is so sophisticated that even without a heavy anchor text percentage, the bot can figure out what the post is generally about.

That’s not to say, you shouldn’t use exact match anchor texts, but you can use less of them.

You don’t want to “stuff” your backlinks with exact match anchor texts either, because it’s not natural and your site can get penalized and it might hurt your rankings rather than help it.

Here are a few different types of anchor texts you can use:

1. Exact match: the exact target keyword
2. Phrase match: extended variations of your target keyword
3. Brand name: brand names such as “Forbes”
4. Branded: variations of brand names like “Forbes Magazine”
5. Keyword branded: mix of target keyword and brand name
6. URL only: links without anchor texts
7. Generic anchors: terms like “click here” or “read more”

You want links back to your site to be as natural as possible including some branded keywords, some generic terms like “click here to read more” and some related keywords.

For example if you’re targeting “North Face Jester Backpack Reviews” then you might want to include these variations:

• Northface backpack reviews
• Jester backpack review
• northfacebackpackreview.com
• Read more here
• go here to read our Northface backpack review

Just think about what keyword people will use naturally to link to your site and you should be fine with your anchor text profile.

9 – Getting Backlinks for SEO Marketing

I’ll list two of my favorite ways to get backlinks that are both safe and effective:

1. HARO Links (Help a Reporter Out)
2. Guest Posts

HARO Links

HARO stands for “Help a Reporter Out” and it’s free to join for all.

With HARO you can potentially get some really high-authoritative backlinks from big editorial sites such as Forbes, Time, and Entrepreneur magazine.

It’s essentially connecting reporters with sources and it creates a win-win scenario for both parties.

Reporters, when writing a news piece, sometimes want to quote sources for a specific topic that they may not be familiar with.

As a source, you are providing the reporter with more information about the topic they are writing about.

And in exchange for being a source for these reporters, you get a shoutout for your business which in many cases comes in the form of a backlink to your website.

This type of backlink is extremely powerful if it’s coming from a website with high trust and authority.

Normally, with HARO backlinks, you won’t get to choose your anchor text, but nonetheless, it is still very powerful.

HARO has reporters from many different industries and subjects, some are, but not limited to:

Overall, I think every company should be using HARO for their SEO marketing strategy because it’s free and you can get powerful backlinks to your business!

Further Reading: Backlink Building Hacks & Secrets Revealed: How We Got 12,000 Backlinks in One Year

Guest Posts

Guest posts are another great way to get some relevant backlinks.

One way of getting relevant backlinks is through reverse engineering your competition.

Let’s pretend you wanted to rank for the keyword, “Green Drink Powder Review.”

Type that keyword into Google, and you’ll see a list of your competitors.

They were able to rank on Google, so let’s see how they did it. We can take a lot of the guesswork out of our backlinking efforts by reverse-engineering success.

Let’s take the number one result on Google (at the time of this writing) and look at what kind of backlinks they have.

You can do this with paid tools, but in this post, I’ll show you a free method (still powerful).

Ahrefs, a popular SEO tool provider, has a free version where you can look up the top 100 backlinks on any webpage.

Just go to their Backlink analyzer tool, copy and paste your competitor’s website into the tool, and voila!

It’ll churn out a list of the top 100 backlinks for the site.

From here, you can copy and paste this into a spreadsheet like Google sheets and start reaching out to the owners of those websites and ask if you can provide content to their site via guest post in exchange for a link back to your website.

You have to manually copy and paste this because in the free version you won’t be able to export and download the list.

When you do get a backlink from one of these sites your authority and trust will rise in Google’s eyes.

And it’s even more powerful if it’s from a website in a relevant subject.

In this example of “Green Drink Powder Review”, getting a backlink from “health” or “health products” or better yet, “healthy drink” sites would be more powerful than getting a backlink from a site about Computers.

So this is a great way to reverse-engineer success and do what’s already working with Google and just copy other people’s strategies.

Further Reading: Guest Blogging: Trick or Treat? Here’s What You Need to Know

SEO Marketing Wrap Up

I hope these tips can help your company rise in the SERPs so you can provide more value to the world.

Traffic can make or break your business.

But if you followed everything I’ve outlined in this post, you can potentially generate natural, organic traffic without having to pay a dime for paid advertising.

Remember as the stats shows above, SEO has one of the highest ROIs in terms of traffic generation.

It’s definitely a worthy investment and I think it’s one that can help all kinds of businesses thrive in the digital world.

Thanks for reading!

-David

Further Reading: 7 Must-Have Ingredients to a Successful SEO Strategy

Author Bio

David Chun is a California based entrepreneur, coach, blogger and digital marketing wizard. He loves blogging about marketing, digital software, personal development and business. He’s written several digital marketing and software pieces on his blog RebelsJourney. He also loves helping people become the best version of themselves through personal mastery and provides coaching to do so. You can read more of his content by visiting his blog.

Hero photo by sarah b on Unsplash